


the life in dead trees

by fabeld



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, F/M, Holocaust, M/M, Original Character(s), Past Child Abuse, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-04-14 05:12:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4551906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabeld/pseuds/fabeld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik Lehnsherr is fourteen when Captain America and The Howling Commandos liberate what remains of Auschwitz. The Allied forces take a liking to both Erik and his mutation, vowing to protect him from escaped war criminal, Klaus Schmidt. It’s isolating, growing up as a Holocaust survivor and a mutant, in a new country, but Erik soon finds that he doesn’t have to carry the weight alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read the archive warnings and tags.

There are voices in the dark. No, Erik thinks as he pushes himself to a seated position, there are voices outside the door; a large slab of metal covered in his blood and sweat, scratch marks buried deep where the knob is meant to be. He can’t see anything in this ocean of darkness but he can feel the imperfections, the grooves, like hard dug valleys between steel mountains, marks he carved like an animal the first night _Herr Schmidt_ threw him in the closet.

He had four seconds, before the door swallowed the light, to survey the suffocatingly small space. The ceiling’s high but Erik can barely stretch both arms before his fingers are curling against dual walls. That first night the concrete floor was cool beneath his cheek but it’s since warmed like an oven. His pores open, spilling liquid he can’t afford to lose, so he presses his tongue flat against his arms and thighs and knees and wrists, lapping up the droplets with his fat, pink muscle.

“I wonder what would you do,” Schmidt asked him once, “for a single drink of water?”

The voices grow closer, quieter than their footsteps, heavy in steel-toed boots. Erik scrambles towards the corner, draws his knees up and makes himself small. There are too many of them — six, seven, eight — and neither with the familiar weight of Schmidt’s coin in his pocket.

The last time the officers arrived without Schmidt they dragged him to a picnic table in the middle of the camp. Off-white table cloth, fine silver, candles, and wine. They made the other prisoners stand, starving and trembling, as they served him finely cooked pork and fish, drowning in a pool of pig’s blood. As his nostrils flared, as his stomach groaned, as his fingers reached for the silver fork and knife, Schmidt’s voice flared in his mind. “You can kill them, you know, you could kill all of us. You just have to want it enough but I — I think you like being here, Erik.”

His fingertips swept across the dull edge of the utensils, muscles and bones humming with a whisper of his power. He could use the officer’s guns, turn them around, put a bullet through their skulls; he could strip his utensils apart, saw them down into arrows and cast them into the hearts of the guard’s lurking in the turrets. He could kill them all, if he wanted. He wanted (he _wants_ , he _needs_ ) but his hunger…the ache…the crater in his stomach…

He stuffed his throat as the officers laughed, their guns trained on the back of his head. He downed the wine, licked his fingers, licked his plate, ignoring the memory of his mother’s voice, whispering the laws of kashrut as he clumsily levitated a knife over their kitchen counter. Seconds after he finished his meal the officers shot six men for the cost of the wine, eleven for the meat, two for the fish, and three for Erik bending at the waist, vomiting it back up.

He can’t, he won’t, go through that again.

There are six metal locks trapping him in the closet, a test to see if Erik can force himself out. He can feel the weight and shape of them, the one on top resting heavily above the rest. The shackle’s melted inside the body so Erik can’t lift it out. He’ll have to bend and snap the metal in two.

A strange rhythm bounces from the lips of the voices, a dance of tongues, no guttural constants battling for dominance.

“ _Fils de salope!_ ”

Erik’s power shrinks at the sound. French, sharp and precise, the way it flows from Schmidt’s mouth. But he can’t — Erik’s toes curl against the ground — he can’t feel the curved edges of Schmidt’s coin or the weight of his watch against his wrist.

“Fuck if I know what you just said but I think I feel the same way.”

Erik’s eyebrows furrow at the second voice, gruff and American. Schmidt knows English too, has been teaching Erik with a wooden ruler to the knuckles, but _Herr Doktor’s_ never sounded quite like this.

Once or twice he’s heard whispers about the war, the Americans and the British banding together to overthrow _der Fuhrer_. The younger officers are afraid but Schmidt assures them they have nothing to fear. “We have won too many battles to lose the war.” Erik won’t allow himself to swallow false hope, to believe in the ghost of words. He’ll believe in salvation once his bruises heal without the looming threat of another.

Perhaps _Herr Schmidt_ has brought an American and a Frenchman to see him. The Amazing Erik who can move metal on command, lest Schmidt cracks his ribs beneath a flick of his finger.

Erik shakes his head and tucks the voices in the back of his head. He sticks his tongue between his teeth and focuses on the first lock. His power’s invisible but he can feel it weaving through his fingertips, shooting out like beams of light, growing bones and muscles and nails of its own. There’s blood in his mouth as the footsteps grow closer, the top lock rattling above the others.

“Holy — do you — hey Frenchie get over here, you gotta see this.”

Crack. The word swells in the forefront of his mind. Bend. Crack. Snap. His tongue stings, blood sticks to his teeth as the lock rattles, shakes, trembles, melts, bends, cracks, snaps.

Erik breathes and his power rushes back inside of him, weaving around his chest and stomach, settling back home. He knows before he opens his eyes, before he reaches out his hand to grip another lock, that he won’t be able to break another. He’s spent the last finger-snap of his energy and won’t be able to move until he succumbs to sleep.

“Is there…” the Frenchman says. “Hello! Is someone in there?”

Blood curls in his throat and Erik swallows it, ignoring the sickness that chases the copper taste. He cannot speak. He cannot do anything but slump in the corner and wait for a new shade of darkness to pull him under.

The butt of a gun beats against the door. “Hey!” says the American.

Schmidt’s taught him to stand, shoulders back, spine straight, smile wide in the presence of guests but his head lolls almost lifelessly to the right.

“Go get Cap,” the American says as Erik’s body grows lighter, “there’s something in there and if it needs this many locks, we’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

 

 

| |

 

A woman sits beside him, petite and Aryan blonde, small mouth pinched as she flips through a magazine. Erik’s eyes adjust to the brightness of the room, the bed beneath him, the white of her uniform. A nurse. She hums beneath her red lips, one leg thrown over her knee. “Oh Bing,” she says, American accent light on her tongue, “you are a man after my own heart.”

Warm lights hang from the curved ceiling, hovering over nine other unoccupied beds. An infirmary, he thinks, at the camp.

Bright spots form in front of his eyes, small suns colliding into bursts of light. His retinas burn, tears pricking the corners of his eyes and Erik remembers with stifling clarity, the darkness, the closet, the locks, the voices, Schmidt.

His spine drags him up from the mattress and the nurse’s magazine falls to the floor. “Hey, kid,” she says, hand on his shoulder, “you need to lay back down.”

Her touch is a bolt of lightening and Erik violently shrugs her off, waiting for the pain that never comes. Her fingers curl into her palm and he draws his knees up, thin sheet pooling around his ankles as he shields his head. She’s going to strike him, small fists beating against his shoulders and back, but he’ll be alright if she can’t reach his head.

“Oh…No,” she says and he’s trembling, hands curved around the back of his neck. “I’m not…I…”

“Please,” he says, English broken and clumsy, worthy of three whacks to the knuckle, “hit me, please, do not —” Don’t draw this out.

Kitten heels rush across tiled floors and Erik’s left with the salt of his tears mixing in his mouth. The room’s empty but he knows he isn’t alone. He’s never alone with Schmidt lurking about, behind every door, beneath every window, around every corner. Erik pushes through his tears and reaches out for the familiar weight of Schmidt’s coin but it’s nowhere he can find.

He extends his reach, grits his teeth and pushes it even further. This isn’t right, he thinks as a headache swells at his temples, Schmidt is always within reach. Five miles, ten miles, twenty. Nothing but the crematorium and tanks and guns, foreign steel burning like wood fire on his tongue.

Where is he? Where is Schmidt?

He feels for the badges on the officer’s uniforms, the familiar bite of their bullets, the edge of their knives. Nothing but the sound of heels dashing closer, heavy footsteps following behind. The nurse bursts through the infirmary’s doors, two spectacled doctors behind her. Their quick chatter is cut short as they pause, mouths open, eyes wide.

Erik’s bed, along with the others, hovers high off the ground, bed frames trembling with the waves of panic spinning from his fingertips. “ _Where am I?_ ” he shouts in German. “ _Where is Herr Schmidt?_ ” He knows this is a test, another trick up Schmidt’s sleeve, and this is what he’s meant to do. Ask for him, beg for him, until he comes out of hiding, proud grin spreading across his thin mouth.

One of the doctor’s swallows thickly before stepping forward. His mouth opens, forms around a few words but Erik can’t hear him over the blood in his ears. “ _Where is Herr Schmidt?_ ” he says again. “ _Where is Herr Doktor?_ ”

The last time he failed Schmidt’s test he broke two of Erik’s fingers. The time before he was made to sleep in the toilets, inhaling piss and shit and laying with the rats for a week.

He extends his right hand and the nurse cries out. The infirmary’s doors weld shut, steel melting beneath the wisps of his power. The doctor steps in front of the nurse, holds up his arms in surrender. “ _Mercy_ ,” he pleads in German and Erik laughs. It’s a hysterical, choking sound, a desperate noise he’s never been capable of before.

“Mercy,” he remembers Schmidt saying, “is for the weak.”

Two legs of his bed frame curl until they’re severed, floating up and on either side of his head. With a wave of his hand he can do what Schmidt’s always wanted — maim, bleed, kill. He can finally pass his test. The nurse hides behind the doctor but that’s alright, Erik doesn’t need to see her to send the metal through the back of her skull. One movement, quick like air, is all it’ll take.

In his head Schmidt says, “You can do it, my boy.” In his head Schmidt says, “Or would you like to lose an eye?”

He flings back his wrist and something sharp punctures the back of his neck. A syringe. Glass. Shooting liquid in his blood. Erik’s arm falls limp and the beds crash to floor, his body slamming onto the mattress. He blinks once, twice and stares up at the frightened face of the second doctor, his trembling hand wielding the syringe as Erik’s vision turns black.

When he wakes up his wrists and ankles are strapped to the bed. His fists clench as he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth, keeping himself from biting it in half. Erik can still feel the wound from before, muscle split open by the sharp edges of his teeth. Two men and a woman stand at the foot of his bed, the uniformed man silent as the pair argues. English flies from their tongues, whipping around the small space between them.

“We don’t know what he is,” the man hisses.

“That doesn’t mean you tie him down like an animal. Look at him,” the woman, British, motions towards him and Erik flinches enough to catch the room’s attention. Three sets of eyes devour his tight jaw and wild eyes, sweat pooling at his hairline, skin flushed beneath the sallow light. “Oh,” the woman says, straightening her back. “Good morning.”

Erik blinks at her uncomfortably limp arms and her fingertips twitching beneath his gaze. There’s no metal on her, on any of them, but he can still feel the dull presence of the bed frame, aching in the back of his head.

“Does he understand English?” the uniformed man says, taller and more blond than the other two.

The woman hums behind tight lips. “ _Hello. You’ve been out for a few days,_ ” she says, Germans stilted and awkward. “ _My name is Agent Carter. Peggy Carter. Are you Erik Lehnsherr?_ ”

Once more Erik blinks dumbly up at her. She takes a step forward and the blond in the uniform steps in front of her. Peggy shoots him a sharp glance. “It’s alright,” she says, in English now, one hand curved around his upper arm. “Erik’s not going to hurt us.” Then in German, “ _You aren’t going to hurt us, are you?_ ”

His tongue weighs heavy in his mouth, dry and sticking to the roof as he speaks. His English isn’t perfect, no matter the shade of purple and black on his knuckles, but it’s passable, enough for them to understand, “I would like to speak with Klaus Schmidt, please.”

The three of them share a look.

“Klaus Schmidt,” the blond says, moving to Erik’s left. “He’s a Nazi.”

Yes, Erik thinks, but he isn’t meant to tell them that. “He’s my…mentor?” Erik says. “Is that…” He’s unsure that he has the right word.

Another shared look and Erik grips the sheets beneath him, cheap fabric scratching against his palms. His throat itches, his tongue’s swollen, his cracked lips ache around each word. The sweltering silence is almost unbearable when Peggy says, in English, “You must be starving. Would you like something to eat?” His stomach answers for him.

Peggy introduces the blond as Captain Steve Rogers. He unties Erik’s wrists and ankles, giving him enough freedom to sit up in bed before Steve leaves. He swallows small rations of bread and butter and applesauce and milk, gagging only once. Peggy sits with him, her eyes roving over the bones in his hands, the tattoo on the inside of his wrist. Erik’s never been a large boy but the longer she’s beside him, the more time he has to compare her healthy mounds of flesh to his wispy limbs.

Erik’s spent hours in the dark, no time to survey the breadth of bruises and wounds on his skin. They glow beneath the infirmary’s light, a map of Schmidt’s fingertips and teeth, of knives and cigarettes and boots and batons.

Peggy explains she’s an agent of an Allied war agency, a group that wishes to assist people like him. “Victims,” she says, and Erik tenses up, “of the Nazi regime.”

“I am not a victim,” he says. Victims are disposable.

Peggy’s smile is sad and soft.

When he proves he can keep down his meal he gets another bowl of applesauce and another glass of milk and the man Peggy calls Howard takes a seat beside her, chocolate bar in hand. Erik’s grip on his glass tightens, the memory of his mother’s body springing to his mind.

“Chocolate’s pretty rare these days,” Howard says, smile slick beneath his mustache. “I’ll give you this whole bar if you tell us everything you know about this, Klaus Schmidt.”

The milk turns sour in his mouth. Between the meal and Peggy’s restrained warmth, he’s almost forgotten that this is nothing but a test. The chocolate, a grave reminder of Erik’s vulnerability, tugs him back to reality.

“I told you,” Erik says, forcing himself to swallow another spoonful of applesauce. “He’s my mentor.”

“Then are you saying,” Peggy leans forward, elbows on her knees, “that you’re a Nazi too?”

No, Erik thinks, I’m a Jew.

He doesn’t realize the words have spun out of his mouth until Peggy’s sitting back and exchanging a look with Howard. He tosses the chocolate bar in the air, a somersault of rectangular sugar, before he catches it with a pinch of his fingers.

“Schmidt locked you in a closet,” Howard says, “and I bet he had something to do with those bruises too.”

Quickly, Erik shakes his head. He’s already misstepped once, he can’t afford to do it again. “We are all forced to ration.”

“Some more than others,” Peggy says.

Erik’s words are like stones in his mouth, rough and covered in dirt, but he has to say them. Schmidt, somewhere, is watching. “The prisoners get less because they are criminals. They don’t — they don’t deserve to —”

“What?” Peggy says. “Be treated like human beings?”

Erik’s fists clench. He remembers cold mornings, his breath forming in the air as Schmidt forced him to stand barefoot while the other prisoners ran laps around the camp, no clothing to shield them from the officers screaming slurs. “The prisoners are treated fine,” he says. Schmidt’s words, not his own. “It is not — The officers cannot force them to eat. If they do not want the food, if they starve themselves, what are they supposed to do?”

Another shared glance and Erik’s fingers twist in his sheets. He wants to shout, wants to beg, _Please let this be over soon! Haven’t I proven myself enough?_

“Erik,” Peggy says, “when was the last time you looked in a mirror?”

Weeks ago, he thinks, maybe months. His concept of time is thin. Schmidt had brought him to his private room, allowed Erik to sit on the edge of his bed, to feel the softness of his mattress before Schmidt kicked him to the floor. There, with his knees curled towards his chest, Erik glanced across the room and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror beside the dresser. Despite his malnutrition and broken bones, he’d grown. His legs were longer and thinner, his cheeks gaunt. At the time he wondered if his face had always looked that way, only now, with a shaved head, he was forced to take notice.

Howard tosses the chocolate bar to Peggy and grabs the rolling mirror from the corner of the room. Tall and slim he drags it to the foot of Erik’s bed, illuminating the strange boy sitting across from him. The right of side of his head’s been shaved down, a jagged wound stitched in its place. A yellowish bruise houses an infection along his left cheek, his bottom lip sags, swollen. His right elbow sits oddly, the bone never set correctly, and his neck is a litter of shallow cuts and burns. He’s a canvas of abuse, a work of manipulated art stretched over a body too tall and thin to be his own.

Erik doesn’t recognize the emptiness in the boy’s grey eyes or the harsh set of his mouth. He doesn’t know that cut of bone at the cheek or those dark circles, like inky pools around the boy’s eyes. Howard wasn’t wielding a mirror but a portal to another dimension where some poor boy’s laying in a room identical to Erik’s own, only he’s in worse shape. Another trick of Schmidt’s, no doubt. He can almost hear his voice in his head. “See, Erik, you don’t have it so bad.”

Then Peggy’s leaning beside him, brown curl dropping on his shoulder. The woman in this other dimension is the spitting image of her, same red lips, square jaw and white blouse tucked in a navy blue pencil skirt. Her fingers graze his arm and the boy in the mirror shudders.

“Oh,” Erik says. The boy in the mirror is him.

“Schmidt did that,” Howard says, “your mentor.” The word sounds odd on his tongue, as if he doesn’t believe it anymore than Erik does.

“We know you’re afraid,” Peggy says, “no one blames you for that, but Erik, you have to tell us everything you know about Klaus Schmidt.”

His tears burn in his nostrils and Erik ducks his head, focusing on the space between his rail thin legs. “ _I can’t,_ ” he says, the words tangled in his native tongue.

“Yes you can,” Peggy says.

Erik shakes his head, two tears dropping along the hollow cave of his cheeks. He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard enough to draw out a gang of multicolored spots. “ _No_ ,” he says. “ _I can’t, I won’t._ ” This is a test, this is nothing more than an elaborate test.

“We’ll protect you,” Peggy says. “He can’t hurt you. None of them can hurt you anymore.”

Erik isn’t afraid of being hurt. Schmidt’s broken him, pulled him apart, sewn him sloppily together only to wake up and start again. He’s learned to stomach the punches and grit his teeth through the broken bones but if he fails Schmidt’s test, Schmidt might kill him and Erik won’t be able to snap his neck first.

His tears warm the palms of his hands and Peggy sits back in her chair as she sighs.

“I want to show him something,” Howard says.

“I don’t think we should move him.”

A pair of wheels rolls across the floor and when Erik looks up, Howard’s gripping a wheelchair. “Come on,” he says, the chocolate bar in the center of the seat, “what do you say? Wanna get out of here?”

His blood runs cold. They’re taking him to Schmidt.

The wheelchair’s made of metal. He could pull it apart and strangle them with the wheels or arms but there’s no point. If he runs, Schmidt will find him, he always does.

So, Erik wipes at his tears and nods.

 

 

| |

 

The stench of the barrack hits Erik the second Howard rolls him inside. The sour taste, on the back of his tongue, familiar like ringed fingers slamming into his jaw. American soldiers move about the cramped space in sweat-stained t-shirts, their jackets wrapped around the shoulders of one or two men at a time. Erik recognizes the other prisoners in the camp, hollow cheeked and dead-eyed, staring into nothingness, muttering to themselves.

Their trembling hands can barely hold their bowls of soup before bending over and vomiting between their legs. The Americans try not to watch, try not to wrinkle their noses as they feed and clean and clothe and comfort at least a hundred prisoners — a hundred Jews — that remain.

Howard wheels him between the makeshift bunks, sickness creeping in his stomach with every quick, sympathetic glance. There used to be other kids in the camp, other boys who lied about their age, but Erik seems to be the only one left. “You’re stronger than you realize,” Schmidt told him once, his boot pressing into the back of Erik’s neck.

A flurry of French explodes to his right and Erik turns his head. He knows that voice, the Frenchman from the other side of the closet. He kneels in front of the only prisoner with enough energy to gesture while he speaks, spitting rapid French as his hands spin higher and higher. The Frenchmen smiles, nods, fixes the too-large jacket thrown over the man’s shoulders. His jacket, Erik assumes.

“Steve,” Howard calls out, “Come over here, will you?”

Captain Steve Rogers has removed the top half of his uniform, a t-shirt in place of blue, white and red. He glances down politely at Erik, clutching the chocolate bar in his lap so tight it’s begun to melt.

“Steve and the rest of the Commandos liberated your camp,” Howard says.

“Not exactly. From what I hear most of the officers and guards escaped, taking the majority of prisoners with them.”

“He’s being modest. They saved you and everyone else here.”

Lies, Erik thinks, false words to trick him into turning on Schmidt.

Erik ducks his head and Steve kneels in front of him, one large hand on the arm of his chair. He bites down on the inside of his cheek, refusing to flinch in the face of Aryan perfection — tall, blue-eyed, blond and broad, someone Erik is meant to worship. If Jews were allowed to roam the streets, Erik’s sure he would’ve seen Steve’s face plastered on posters in the windows of shops that used to belong to his people. Perhaps he's a German film star, trained in the art of accents, disguised as an American hero, eager to catch Erik in Schmidt’s trap.

“The guys seem to think there’s some kind of ghost in that place where we found you,” Steve says, “but I’ve got a feeling you had something to do with this.” From his pocket Steve pulls a broken lock, the shackle messily snapped in half. Erik’s power hums at the sight of it, the lock from the closet.

He can’t control the raise of his hand or the outreach of his arm. Palm up, he silently begs for the lock, the metal singing quietly to him. Steve cracks a smile and hands it over, Erik’s fingers curling around it protectively. Schmidt may punish him for his missteps, but he won’t be able to take this from him. Erik won’t let him.

“This Klaus Schmidt,” Steve says, “kept files on you, you know. Called you a —”

“Mutated human,” Howard says.

“Yeah. The files say you have powers, that you can,” Steve taps his closed fist, “manipulate metal. Now if there’s one thing I’ve learned since being over here, it’s that you can’t trust a Nazi. But after what I’ve been through, and after what the others saw, I’m inclined to think there might be some truth there.”

The lock warms in his palm, hot enough to burn but Erik feels nothing but the lump growing in his throat. _Herr Schmidt_ has never told him what to say in the face of a stranger asking about his powers. Was he meant to lie and deny them? Or proudly tip his head and show what he can do?

Howard makes his decision for him. “Before you think about lying,” he says, stepping beside Steve, “Doctor Covington and Doctor Hatcher saw your little trick with the beds.”

The lump in his throat hardens like a rock.

The lock melts in his hand, metal forming a warm disc. It bounces and reshapes, curling into itself, growing smaller and rounder, his power etching a reichseagle, a swastiska, the jowls of Paul von Hindenburg. The coin, a replica of Schmidt’s, rolls between his fingers and Erik offers it to Steve.

Steve doesn’t dare to touch it but he can’t pull his eyes away. Erik curls his fingers forward and allows the coin to levitate. Howard’s mouth drops open as he bends forward, hands on his knees to take a closer look. “Well I’ll be damned,” he says.

Erik’s eyes dart around the barrack. No one’s watching them but two prisoners staring blankly in their direction. It’s enough for Erik’s power to slip, for the coin to drop past his fist. Steve catches it, reflexes quick like lightening, and he hands it to Erik, pinched between strong fingers.

“That’s amazing,” Steve says, “You — Wow.”

Erik wants to ask about Schmidt, where he’s hiding and is the test over yet, but he can’t help but bathe in the admiration in Steve and Howard’s eyes. There’s no malicious edge, no cruel twist of the mouth, only reverence as thick as the crowd in the barrack.

“We’re gonna keep you safe, kid,” Howard says, “you have to believe that. All we want to do is help.”

Steve’s mouth spreads into a warm smile. “It’s nothing but the truth.”

Erik glances around the barrack, at the prisoners, eating and drinking and clothed; wary but without the weight of German officers screaming at the back of their heads. If he fails this test there’s no doubt in Erik’s mind that Schmidt will kill them all, with bullets and rope and knives and gas, shoving the guilt down Erik’s throat. But if it isn’t as test…

The first two weeks after his mother’s death Erik dreamt of salvation, of grasping enough power to take apart the camp in seconds. He’d bury the guards and officers and Schmidt beneath heaps of metal, and he and the rest of the prisoners would be free. But in Auschwitz dreams die and reshape into nightmares, fully realized every time Erik opened his eyes.

But maybe, just maybe…

Erik closes his eyes and reaches out once more for Schmidt’s coin. Five miles, ten miles, twenty, thirty. Nothing but the weight of the metal in his palm.

Steve and Howard smile at him, Steve a beacon of patience, Howard, eager and antsy.

“I do not know much,” Erik says, words thick in his throat, “but I — I would like to help.”

Steve’s careful hand rests on the jagged curve of Erik’s knee. “Anything you tell us will help,” he says. “Anything at all.”

 

 

| |

 

The inevitable fallout looms over Erik’s head like overcast skies and the sound of warplanes ripping through the wind. The other prisoners are left behind in Poland, loaded up and taken to safety, an act Peggy assures isn’t one of Schmidt’s tricks. They tell him Schmidt’s missing, that he and the other officers deserted the camp after receiving word that The Howling Commandos were close. Steve tells him that they’re searching for him, “High and low, I promise,” but Erik isn’t sure he wants Schmidt to be found. If he’s truly missing, if this isn’t some elaborate test, he’ll find a way to take Erik back.

He spends two weeks in the infirmary, in their Allied base in London, plagued by the tonnage of his nightmares. He can feel Schmidt’s fingers lingering on his skin, his whiskey-soaked breath hot against his ear, the sound of his mother’s body hitting the floor, her laughter like kisses brushing against his cheek, the butt of an officer’s gun, the taste of blood — not his — in his mouth.

Erik wakes up to metal objects floating around him and learns to gently lead them back into place. Once or twice he unconsciously welds the infirmary door shut but he learns to control that too.

Daily, he sits with Howard who explains the mechanics of weaponry between blindfolding Erik and asking him to identify different metal types using only his power. It’s a test Schmidt used to run, one he outlined in Erik’s file, but when Erik mixes up zinc and copper, Howard doesn’t grip the back of his head, nails digging into his scalp. Rather, he encourages Erik to take his time, to use all of his senses to feel the difference.

“We’ve got all day, kid,” he says, “let’s take five minutes and try again.”

Steve and Howard’s German is rudimentary at best, so with them Erik works on his English. He’s a quick study, latching onto the language and it’s strange cadences like a fish thrown into water. Some of The Howling Commandos and other agents who wander in and out of the base pass down their books to him. _Tarzan of the Apes_ , _The Weary Blues_ , _The Great Gatsby_. Erik tries to imagine burying his memories in a house of excess, of creating and slipping on a skin that isn’t his own.

“An alter ego,” Steve says, one afternoon while he’s teaching him Blackjack in Howard’s workshop.

“Yes. Like you and Captain America.”

Steve sets down a nine of hearts. Eighteen total. “Well then you gotta come up with a new name.”

“Max,” Erik says.

“Max, huh? Where’d you get that from?”

Erik shrugs and sets down a four diamonds. Twenty one.

Steve smiles. “Well damn, you beat me again.”

 

 

| |

 

Two months in a wave of death hits them like a hurricane. Agents who Erik’s grown used to disappear into battle, then Sergeant James Barnes, then Steve. Erik’s sleeping when it happens but he knows, once he wakes and is met with nothing but the chill of silence, that something’s wrong.

Howard drinks himself stupid and Peggy arranges a memorial service with a tight mouth and wet eyes. Dum Dum, who’s always stared at Erik as if he were something to be feared and pitied, sneaks him into the Whip & Fiddle, buys him a beer and looks away when he cries.

At night he lays in bed and reaches for the ceiling, his power stretching beyond the base and into the city around them. Erik knows they’re too far away from the Arctic but that doesn’t stop the backs of his teeth from grounding together, jaw and bones and muscle and blood aching as he pushes himself further and further. He can find him, he knows it, he only has to want it enough.

Ten miles, twenty, thirty, sixty. His head throbs, veins pulsating to the point of bursting, but he can keep going. He must. The metal in his small room rattles, the door knob twists violently. Seventy, eighty, one hundred miles.

Erik brushes against a large metal structure with engines and wheels and wings, before he touches something familiar. He feels the rough edges, the raised image, the weight, the heat. Schmidt.

His power recoils, slamming into him with the crack of a whip, knocking him back against the mattress, a shout thick in his throat. Erik screams, a feral and uncontrolled sound, Schmidt’s location a beacon in the forefront of his mind.

He knows where he is — the man who killed his mother, the man who pushed him to the point of begging for a knife to his throat. Schmidt’s in France, boarding a plane, moving, escaping. Erik screams a little louder, voice tearing at the inside of his throat. He wonders if it's possible to scream loud enough and tear Schmidt's plane apart from here.


	2. Chapter 2

It takes two weeks after Steve’s memorial service for some semblance of normalcy to settle into Erik’s bones. Peggy no longer speaks with a knot tied around her throat, Howard’s down to two drinks a day, the Howling Commandos look to Dum Dum for instruction, and Captain America’s slowly begun to fade into the martyr, the symbol, he was always meant to be. “With or without him,” Howard says, tossing bullets in the air for Erik to twist and bend, “the world still turns.”

Erik moves into Peggy’s two-bedroom flat, his bedroom larger and warmer than his quarters at the base. He spends an hour, lounging on the twin-sized bed, staring at the sloped ceiling, the tape criss-crossed on the single window, the modest painting hanging above the dresser, the rug tossed near the door, the mirror in the corner. Home. Not his but something very close to it. Four walls that exist without the marks of his teeth carved into the plaster, without the memory of Schmidt lining him up, blindfold tight around his eyes, the sound of a gun’s safety releasing in his ears.

Some nights he wakes with the taste of Schmidt’s coin in his mouth (zinc, soft and sharp) his presence an unrelenting specter. Peggy assures him there are few rocks the Nazi’s can hide under but Erik hears the reports on the radio. More camps are being liberated, nothing left behind but sickly prisoners and low-level officers with secrets woven between their teeth, standing at iron gates with their hands and weapons in the air, surrendering their bodies but not their loyalty.

Peggy’s gone for hours, sometimes days, on missions involving another menacing figure named Schmidt. She returns with blood on her cheek and bruises on her knuckles, her hair an undone mess atop her head. She collapses on the living room couch and teaches Erik how to clean a gun, residue painting his fingertips black. He finds an ancient cookbook shoved beneath the sink, a stranger’s handwriting looped in brown corners, and convinces Howard to supply him with a bottle of vodka for a pie’s crust.

He tries to teach Peggy how to bake _Zwiebelkuchen_ (no bacon), but she’s only half-listening as his mother’s instructions guide him around her kitchen. She leans against the kitchen counter, white wine swimming in her glass, watching as his power takes hold of the knife and whisk, chopping onions and stirring the eggs and sour cream while he sprinkles more flour on the dough.

“You’re getting very good. Soon you’ll be able to drive a car without getting out of bed.”

Erik laughs, the sound weaving from it’s place buried idle in his stomach. “If I do, will you let me have a glass of wine at dinner?”

“Not until you're sixteen and not a second sooner.”

They have dinner in the dining room, at an old card table left behind by the previous tenants. Americans who abandoned the flat the second the war broke out.

“You know,” Peggy says, cloth napkin spread in her lap, “I wish my father could see me now. His daughter, off to war, while someone else takes care of the kitchen. He’d think he stumbled into one of his nightmares.”

Erik smiles, not quite used to the upward tug of his mouth. “My father would be proud that I did not burn the crust.”

There’s a pause, long enough to draw Erik’s attention to the softening corners of Peggy’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says, utensils shifting awkwardly in her hands, “you’ve never — I’ve never heard you talk about your parents.” Erik’s brows furrow as he glances down at his plate, a healthy serving of pie, vegetables and mashed potatoes. “I’m sorry,” she repeats, “I shouldn’t have —”

“I don’t…You do not have to apologize, I…” His mother’s body springs to the forefront of his mind, pale legs and arms mangled on the cement floor of Schmidt’s office, blood rushing from the hole in her skull. A pinch of vomit swells on the back of his tongue and he washes it down with a hefty bite of his meal. He swallows and says, “I should talk about them, I think.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.” Erik tries another smile. “But…” Perhaps it’s what his mother would’ve wanted, for her memory live through anecdotes shared over a warm meal. They sink beneath a shroud of silence, poking at their meal, small bites dissolving in their mouths. Erik opens his mouth to ask what Peggy thinks of the pie but what comes out is, “I do not know if my father is alive or not.”

Peggy’s gaze snaps up from her plate. “Oh?”

“We were not — they transported him to a different camp.” It’s a dangerous thought, one tinted with the toxicity of hope. His father could still be alive, curled in the corner of a fetid barrack, waiting, hoping, praying for liberation.

“What did your father do?” Peggy says. “Before the war?”

“He was a solider. In the Great War.”

“He must be an admirable man.”  _Be_ , presently.

“He was — _is_ — In Dusseldorf he was a tailor but that was before,” the _Strumabteilung,_ with their unyielding German pride, camped outside of their building, wielding signs of warnings and slurs ( _Die Juden sind unser Ungluck!_ ) before tossing burning trashcans through the window. Erik remembers the smell of embers filtering up to their apartment, burning the inside of his nostrils as his father shook him awake, eyes wide and cheeks wet. “This is our country too,” his father said as they abandoned the city beneath the cloak of night, “Are we not allowed to live?”

“And your mother?” Peggy says, treading carefully, soft feet in a minefield. “Did she work?”

Erik shakes his head. “My father made enough that she did not have to.”

Another bout of silence stretches between them, filled only with the clatter of utensils. Peggy finishes her pie, sets her fork and knife neatly on either side of her plate before, “What’s your best memory of her?”

Erik blinks. “Of my mother?”

Peggy folds her hands in her lap and nods.

Erik’s memories are photographs tainted with ash, black spots covering bright eyes and wide grins, reminding him of smoke and charred flesh and burning lungs and death. He flips through his mental picture book, searching for snapshots of his mother’s smile but he can find only her face, floating against a blanket of nothingness. He unravels the spool of time, chasing the first flicker of his memory, but there’s nothing that Schmidt, that this war, hasn’t touched. His clearest memory of his mother is her frail, trembling body, standing a few feet behind him as her life dangled above his head. He remembers the smell of her fear, the sound of her tears as she locked them in her throat, his name a quick breath on her lips before his ears began to ring.

The utensils and legs of the table rattle, Erik’s hand tightening around his fork. He hates Schmidt, hates the Nazi’s, and hates this war for dragging his mind beneath a swamp of darkness, for killing his mother and his memories of her too.

Peggy’s fingers curl against the table before she’s on her feet and rushing to Erik’s side. He can taste silver (tinny and sour) in his mouth as the utensils begin to rise. “It’s alright,” she says, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his wrist. “I’m sorry, I didn’t — Erik, please. Take a breath and look at me. Please, look at me.”

Her voice is a ghost in the back of his mind, whipping through his memories like smoke. “Erik, darling, I need you to —” Peggy leaves him, footsteps flat against the apartment floor before she’s kneeling beside him again. “Focus on this,” she says, an object pinched between two fingers. “Look at this.”

Erik blinks and his power settles low in his stomach, control pouring back into his bones. He stares at the coin, at it’s rough edges, the profile on the front. He feels the warmth of her fingers against the metal.

“There you are,” she says, a careful smile tugging at her mouth. “Welcome back.”

Erik tries another smile but it disappears as his bottom lip gives out, hot tears rolling down his cheeks. Violently, he scrapes them away, the backs of his hands beating against his face.

“Erik,” Peggy says, fingers around his wrist. “Stop it. It’s — you’re alright, you’re fine.”

“ _No_ ,” he says, German slipping. He clears his throat, forces his tongue back to English. “I can’t — I can’t remember anything good.”

Peggy’s a watery, wavering figure, distorted by his tears but Erik knows pity when he sees it. Her eyes and mouth turn down, thumbs massaging the inside of his wrists. “Oh, Erik,” she says before wrapping him up, a mother consoling a child. He’ll never be able to hold his mother again, won’t smell the scent of her perfume or feel her curls brush against his cheek. This, a warm exchange with a woman who helped save him, is the closest he’ll ever get.

“I hate him,” Erik spits into Peggy's shoulder. The replica of Schmidt’s coin warms in her hand, growing hot enough for her to release it. The coin floats upwards, spins over their heads. “I am going to find him,” Erik says, holding onto her tight, “and I am going to _fucking_ kill him.”

 

 

| |

 

There are mornings Howard grabs breakfast from the pub down the road and Peggy’s flat fills with the scent of three classic English fry-ups, hold the pork. Erik’s stomach rumbles as he wakes, the sour taste of another nightmare on his tongue; Schmidt’s hand over his mouth as thin fingers pinched his nostrils, cutting off his air supply. At least, Erik thinks, he didn’t wake Peggy with his screaming.

His bare feet land on the floor, fists scrubbing sleep from his eyes as he adjusts to the voices battling in the kitchen. Howard raises his voice and Peggy matches him, her tone unwavering. “There’s absolutely no one else better equipped to lead them,” she shouts, “and you know it’s true!”

“I know that _anyone_ else would be a better choice!”

Peggy grows silent, Howard’s words like a knife to the throat. Erik can almost see her, fists clenched as she stares him down.

“I didn’t.” Howard pauses. “I meant…”

“After all this time you don’t think I’m good enough.”

“No —”

“Then what?”

“I don’t need you going out there and never coming back!”

“None of this,” Peggy says, “is about what you want.”

Erik opens his bedroom door before the tremors of their argument can tear through the kitchen. Howard and Peggy wear matching looks, startled and guilty, but Erik ignores them in favor of gathering a plate and settling at the card table.

“I would like to go out today,” he says, crushing his egg yolk with the back of his fork. “Last night, on the radio, they said some people are braving Tower Foreshore.”

The tension in the air melts like ice on the tongue, slow but inevitable. Howard grabs his plate, sits to Erik’s right. “You’d have to be an idiot to want to go swimming in this weather.”

Erik shrugs. “I’d like to see who is stupid enough to try.”

Peggy sits in her usual spot, across from Erik and to Howard’s left, picking at her food with stiff shoulders and a tight mouth. “Alright,” she says, “but you have to eat everything on your plate.”

“And,” Howard says, “you’ll have to identify the make and model of the three cars parked outside.”

“Blindfolded?” Erik says.

“Blindfolded.”

Erik stuffs his fried egg in his mouth, yolk pouring down his chin. He plucks an idiom from one of the American novels piled high in his room. “Piece of cake.”

London’s a mess of rubble, dirt-faced children playing in the ruins of a secondary school, men stumbling drunk past the sight of their destroyed workplace, mothers sharing a single cigarette as they clutch their ration coupons. It’s odd, watching the fringes of devastation within the warm confines of Howard’s car, a single automobile floating down the road, burning exorbitantly priced fuel, like living on the other side of a fishbowl, disconnected from the underwater calamity.

Erik catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, cheeks full, eyes bright and tries to imagine that it’s months before the war. His parents have already escaped to Switzerland and Howard and Peggy are flying him there. He’ll catch twenty minutes of sleep on the plane, anxiety, anticipation, keeping him up for the majority of the ride. He’s escaping persecution and being reunited with his parents. He wants it so terribly he can feel it burning in the back of his skull.

They park a block away from the Thames. Peggy loops her arm around Erik’s as Howard leads them towards the scent of cool, fresh water. Erik’s grown since they found him, his forehead now a few inches above Peggy’s shoulder. “You’re going to be very tall, you know,” she says, wind brushing through her hair. “I bet you’ll tower over Howard.”

“Who doesn’t,” Erik says, “tower over him, I mean.”

Howard spins on his heels, middle finger sharp and erect. Peggy buries her laughter in Erik’s shoulder. “That isn’t funny,” she says. “You’re terrible.”

“I’m terrible?” Howard grins. “He’s not making fun of you.”

“No. I would never do that.”

Peggy beams at him, the weather tinting her cheeks pink. “That is true loyalty.”

Six young men gather on the beach, a few years older than Erik. He and Howard and Peggy watch their bare feet curl into the sand, cheeks filling with air before one of them counts off — three, two, one — and layer by layer, their clothes land in a messy heap.

“Oh,” Peggy says as their pale flesh hits the air. She blushes and pointedly turns her head, looking at Erik, “I should cover your eyes shouldn’t I?”

“I have seen worse.”

It happens again, the pregnant pause that grows thick in Peggy’s mouth, a private, personal scolding for saying something wrong, for digging up memories incapable of being buried. Erik gives her a reassuring smile, refusing to soften the corners of his mouth, no matter how they tremble, until Peggy’s smiling back, her hand tightening in the crook of his elbow.

Howard laughs and they turn their attention back to the water where one of the young men has fallen to his knees. He reaches forward, grabbing the thigh of a friend, hard enough to send him crashing face-first into the Thames. The pair of them sputter about like children who have yet to take to water, uncoordinated limbs struggling in a shallow pool. Howard laughs a little harder, one hand resting on the curve of his stomach and Peggy joins him. Erik can feel her laughter in her fingertips, spreading beneath the fabric of his coat and under his skin, traveling up, up, up until it builds in his mouth and a foreign sound rolls out. Two more young men fall and their laughter pitches them forward, the three of them like school children, bathing in an effortless moment of joy.

“What did I tell you?” Howard says. “Idiots.”

Peggy takes a seat first, her coat shielding her skirt from the sand. Erik and Howard follow until they’re bundled together on the beach, Peggy to Erik’s left, Howard to his right. From his pocket Howard pulls a single cigarette and it’s instinctual, the way Erik’s power wraps around the lighter in his jacket, pulling it free and igniting a flame, the metal case hovering within reach.

“What the hell are we gonna do once you’re gone, kid?” Howard says.

A soft smile tugs at his mouth. “Where am I going?”

Howard can barely meet his eyes before his gaze slips back to the water, the young men doused from head to toe. He takes another drag of his cigarette, blows smoke from the corner of his mouth. Peggy shifts, her knee knocking into Erik’s, hands folded tightly on her lap. The tension from that morning returns, weaving around the three of them like a rope. Erik can almost feel the weight of it against his neck, tight enough to dry out his mouth.

“Is someone going to speak?” he says.

Howard finishes his cigarette and opens his mouth but Peggy says, “I will,” before his words can escape. She clears her throat and turns to face them, heels buried in the sand. “As you know, the war is coming to an end. My country, our countries, need all the help they can get and with every agent that — who doesn’t return,” for a blink of a second her eyes glaze over before she clears her throat, “the more of us are needed in the field.”

“Have you not been…in the field?” Erik says.

“Part-time,” says Howard, “but Peggy wants to spend weeks, instead of days, in the line of fire.”

Peggy’s jaw clenches dangerously, narrowed eyes cast over Erik’s shoulder.

Erik ignores it. “So you will be gone for longer periods of time?”

Peggy rests her hand atop his knee, the warmth of her palm overpowering the chill in the air. “Yes and I,” another pause, “I don’t know if I’ll make it back.”

“Which is why you should stay here,” Howard says.

Peggy purses her mouth, another silent standoff between them, one she wins the second Howard pushes himself to his feet. “I’m going to…” He motions towards the group of young men, two of them stumbling back to shore, pulling on their pants and slipping cigarettes from a shared pack.

Peggy waits until he’s out of earshot to speak. “We have to prepare for the worst, and that means making sure you have somewhere else to go.”

Howard offers the young men a few crumpled notes in exchange for another cigarette, smoke curling above them like translucent halos. A memory hits him, his first evening out of the infirmary, bruises healing and a warm meal resting comfortably in his stomach. He ran into Falsworth who, barely meeting his eyes, grasped for conversation before he offered Erik a cigarette, “To um, you know, if anyone needs one it’s you.”

Steve caught him, teary-eyed and hacking up phlegm in the break room, faint flames licking at his fingers. “You might wanna wait until you can stand up for more than a few minutes,” he said, strong palm slapping against his back, “or is this just an excuse to get more of the nurses’s attention?”

Steve’s touch, his voice, spreads like cobwebs in his chest, frozen silk swinging from his ribcage, growing heavy enough to break bone.

“Women,” his father used to say, “don’t belong in a war.” A common sentiment Peggy refuses to share. Erik inhales the faint scar along her cheek, the bold line of black on her eyelid, the red of her nails, the brown of her eyes. If something happens to her — he can’t, he won’t think about it — but he has to.

He wants to remember Howard and Peggy like this, wisps of the Thames brushing against their skin, wind twirling around the strands of their hair. He wants to remember their laughter, the spread of their mouths around their teeth, how Peggy’s knee feels against his own, how Howard’s cigarettes smell expensive like his cologne. He doesn’t want this panic, this time bomb building in his stomach. And though he knows, like all things, this can never last, he can stretch this moment until it bends.

“Can we talk about this later? I would…” Like to stay in this moment, drown in it, without the weight of the war.

Another pregnant pause and Peggy’s hand finds his own, fishing it from his coat pocket, winding their fingers together. “Of course,” she says, their knuckles forming indents in the sand. “We can do whatever you want.”

 

| |

 

The Soviets liberate another camp and their conversation can no longer wait.

Peggy waits until the evening to knock on the threshold of Erik’s bedroom door, the setting sun dressing her in pinks and oranges. She tugs her hands behind her back and says, “Howard has a friend.”

Erik sets her battered copy of _To The Lighthouse_ facedown on his pillow, his mind swimming with the sound of tempestuous waves, beating like fists against barbed rocks. “When do I have to leave?”

Peggy’s face falls. “You don’t — Well I suppose you do — but Erik,” she steps into the room, “Howard and I.” She pauses, collects her words in her mouth. “You have a choice. Please know that you always have a choice.”

An unexpected rush of anger swims up the back of his neck, a scowl twisting at the corner of his mouth. Schmidt used to tell him something similar, only with his hand wrapped around his throat.

“His name’s Samuel Pryde,” she says, “and the two of you have a significant amount in common. He’s Jewish and —”

“I do not see how that gives us a _significant_ amount in common.”

Peggy straightens her back, eyes widening a fraction as she stares down at Erik, the pleasantness smacked from her face. He’s never spoken to her with such bite, the edges of his words frayed and soaking with spit. She takes a breath before, “He’s also an immigrant.”

“From?”

“Poland. He immigrated to the States during the Great War.”

It’s Erik turn to sit a little straighter, back and shoulders like the edge of a knife. He says, “I do not understand,” but Erik, no matter what Schmidt has screamed in his ear, has never been slow to catch up.

“Howard and I thought, well, that you might prefer a change of scenery.”

Laughter, humorless and thin, sticks to the inside of his cheeks. The Nazi’s have run his family out of their home, out of their country, and now the Allied forces wish to uproot him from Europe. Erik can’t leave when his father might still be alive, when Schmidt, the man who killed his mother, who nearly destroyed his will to live, is roaming freely on the continent.

“What are my other options?” he says, fingers twisting in his sheets.

Peggy grows quiet and lingers in the center of his room — _the_ room, not his own — taking in what he’s done with the place. Her modest book collection has been moved to the corner by the mirror. Erik’s read through most of them, using more complex passages to practice writing in English. He’s getting better by the day, and he wonders, wherever he goes, will there be enough paper and pencils and space and time for him to continue?

“Bergen-Belsen,” she says, “what do you know about it?”

“It is a camp,” his nails dig into the mattress, “in Bergen.” In the corner of his eye a memory plays out, Erik on his back in the living room, hands folded atop his chest as the old radio crackles with news. Six thousand prisoners, thirteen thousand corpses.

“That’s right and now.” She pauses again, looks at him. “Would you mind if I sat down?”

 _Yes_. The word thumps against his ribcage, begging for release, but he swallows it like his anger, leashing it until it’s resting calmly at his feet. Erik nods and Peggy sits beside him, a hair’s breath of space between them.

“You’ve never asked what happens after the camps are liberated. To be honest, I didn’t know the answer until recently. In Bergen, some miles away from the camp, they’re using German barracks to house survivors —”

“You are putting us back in camps.”

“No,” Peggy says, quickly. “It’s not a camp, it’s —”

His leashed anger scratches at the soles of his feet, digging through blood and bone to swim up to his fingertips. His hands pull and twist, forming holes in the sheets before he’s on his feet and rushing to the opposite side of the room. He has to get away from where he can hear Peggy’s voice swimming in his head, her perfume spoiling in his nostrils, the scent of dead flowers crushed beneath a leather boot.

“Do not lie to me!” he screams, loud enough to rattle the walls. The knobs on his dresser, the frame of the mirror, the coins and trinkets laying about the room sing to him, a violent crescendo of violins and doldrums. “I —” His words form nails, burying so deep in his throat he can’t pull them out. He trusted Peggy and Howard and the Allied forces. They promised to keep him safe and yet…

Peggy grips the mattress beneath her, her facade of calm shattering by the second. “Erik,” she says, quietly, slowly, “no one’s lying to you. You have to let me explain.”

His fist curls at his side and a crack, like lightening, shoots down the mirror. It’s metal frame bends beneath the weight of his power. Peggy’s eyes widen. Her breath audibly quickens.

“ _Explain what_?” he says, German eating his tongue’s ability to form around English. “ _You’re lying like they lied to get us on the train, like Schmidt lied to…to —_ ”

Schmidt. Of course. They’re turning him over, giving him up, tossing him to Schmidt’s feet to swallow his punishment for failing his test with spectacular error.

Peggy slowly rises, arm outstretched as if Erik’s an animal wandering outside of his cage. He cannot, will not allow her to touch him. Her lies, her false smiles, the smell and sight of her boils in his stomach until his arm jerks forward and his power explodes. Erik knocks her off her feet, the back of her head slamming against the floor as a strip of the mirror’s frame wraps around her neck. He warms the edges, melting and pinning them to the ground as she kicks and scrambles for release.

“Erik,” she says, pitiful and pleading. “We aren’t trying to hurt you, we want — we’re only trying to help. You don’t have to go!”

His jaw audibly clenches. It’s always been his choice: to board the train to Auschwitz, to fail to save his mother, to never defy Schmidt, to stay here, with her and Howard, agents of Schmidt, so cleverly disguised. He’s made so many poor choices and they’ve only led him into another seemingly inescapable corner, a circle of events that lead him back to Schmidt.

He’s stronger now, can turn a bullet on its head without exerting all his energy, can expand Schmidt’s watch into a collar, wrapping it around his throat and pushing through skin, muscle, and bone. He can kill him — wants, _needs_ to kill him — and if Peggy and Howard are going to lead Erik to Schmidt, he’ll let them do the honors. He’ll make them watch as Schmidt’s life flickers dimly in his eyes before picking up a dull knife to hack messily at their throats.

“Erik,” Peggy says, fingers curled around the metal, trapping her at the neck. “Please.” She blinks and a tear rolls across the side of her face and into her hair. He fights the urge to wipe it away.

“I am going to let you go,” he says. “You are going to call Howard and the both of you will take me to this new camp. If you say anything about this,” he tightens the metal, “I promise to snap your neck.”

The metal sighs as he tosses it across the room, revealing the pale stretch of Peggy’s neck. Another tear catches in her hair as she stares up at Erik, clumsily wrangling her fear, but he can see it in her eyes and parted mouth and tense shoulders and nails curling against the floor.

“Do you understand?” he says, readying himself for a flurry of limbs but only her bottom lip trembles as Peggy turns her head and nods.


	3. Chapter 3

Howard buys him a suitcase, brown leather with gold clasps and his initials woven on the inside. E.M.L. Erik Magnus Lehnsherr. An outstretched finger glides over the letters, looping around silver mountains as a pinch of vomit forms in the back of his throat. He can’t take this with him. Schmidt will crush the frame beneath his boot, books and trinkets bowing to his weight. He’ll start a fire with his things, flames licking against the clasps. A small whisper builds inside of him. _Good_. He wants to destroy all that Schmidt’s agents have given to him under the guise of protection, friendship, and love.

His heart swells, mercilessly beating against his ribcage as he lines the suitcase with new pants, new shirts, new underwear, new socks, a new jacket, a new tie (“You never know when you’ll need one,” Howard said with a wink.), it’s matching tie clip, new cufflinks, new shoes, and a wide brimmed hat too large for his head.

Peggy’s books stare at him from their tower in the corner, worn edges begging for escape, but he can’t look at them without smelling her perfume or thinking of her as a girl, scribbling nonsense in the corners. _This is far too many words to say ‘I love you’!_

He packs only his copy of _A Farewell to Arms_ , given to him by Steve. Erik remembers sitting with him after Steve’s morning run, audibly stumbling through thin passages but ever determined to continue. Steve never rushed him and only interrupted when the knot of Erik’s tongue grew too large for his mouth. Erik flips to a page folded into itself and finds the line Steve underlined in black ink. “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Erik dresses in his new blazer, dark green with brown patches at the elbows, and pants Howard assures him he’ll grow into. Gone are the bruises and dark circles, faint scars left in their wake; pale pink reminders of Schmidt’s fingers cracking his bones. With his hair cut short and combed neatly to the right, Erik hardly recognizes the boy in the mirror. That boy will grab his suitcase by the foot of the bed and head to the car waiting for him outside. He’ll curl in the backseat, head pillowed on his arms as he drifts for the long journey away from London. He’ll wake up hours later in a part of England untouched by the war, where his boarding school professors wear their casual anti-Semitism with pride. At least, they think, we aren’t animals like the Nazis.

That boy is not him.

Erik grabs his suitcase and meets Peggy in the living room, her hands clasped nervously at her lap. She smiles at him but it doesn’t stick, fear and anger and pity and relief winning out in the end. “Ready?” she says, glancing at the picture he makes, so utterly put together. He can almost feel the compliment forming on her tongue but she swallows it. There’s no use in pretending that she finds anything pleasant about him anymore.

Howard remains oblivious, grinning brightly at the sight of Erik wearing the clothes he paid for. “I gotta be honest,” he says once they’re in the car, “I’m jealous that I’m not the best looking man in London anymore.”

Erik forces down his vomit, meets Howard’s eyes in the rearview mirror and pushes his mouth into a smile.

What little conversation that exists during the plane ride to Germany is bookended by words spiraling from Howard’s mouth. From what he’s heard, the British are doing everything to make Bergen-Belsen more comfortable for it’s inhabitants. “It is difficult with so many people,” he says. “I’m not gonna lie to you, kid, a lot of them need medical attention the doctor’s aren’t equipped to provide. They’re flying in more but that’ll take days. Are you…You sure you don’t wanna head to New York? If you’re worried about immigration papers, don’t, I can —”

“No,” he says, with more force than intended but he can’t…He can’t listen to this bullshit anymore. “I am fine.” He pushes his hands beneath his legs, praying the weight of his thighs will keep him from tearing the plane apart. “I want…” He gathers up the proper words but only half appear. “I need to be with other…”

“Survivors?” Peggy says.

Erik looks at her. She holds their eye contact, unblinking and unwavering. It’s a cruel joke, a silent laugh at how far he’s come, only to stumble back into the mouth of the lion. He may have survived the first round of Schmidt but he won’t make it out of this one. With the war coming to an end, all disloyal witnesses must hang.

He used to dream of ropes crawling around his neck, frayed edges pinching sensitive skin, the noose tight enough to bruise. Balanced on the edge of a stage he’d rock back and forth, wondering, can the rope withstand the weight of his fear? He doesn’t fear death but he’s afraid of the moments before it, the limbo where life slowly drains from his blood, leaving behind a creeping sense of nothingness. There is no God, that Erik knows, only moral-less humans searching blindly for purpose.

Erik’s purpose is this: He will destroy Schmidt, starting with the fingers he wrapped around the gun that killed his mother, and ending with a blade to the corner of his ever-smirking mouth. He won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing the breadth of Erik’s power, the growth of his control. He’ll happily wield the weapon with a trembling, sweaty hand, hacking away until there’s nothing left but a gaping pit of black and red.

 

| |

 

A cargo truck picks them up from a field near Bergen where Howard lands his plane. Erik rides in the front with Howard and Peggy sandwiched in the middle, his suitcase resting at his feet. The driver wears the uniform of the British army but Erik refuses to be fooled. No matter the accent rolling off his tongue, he’s an agent of Schmidt’s, aiding in his recapture.

Bergen is alive with the scent of death, hanging in the air like leaden clouds. The smell thickens as the truck crawls closer to the camp and Erik has a quick thought about running. His door’s unlocked, he could wedge it open and topple out on his side. He’ll run until he can’t feel his legs and find a farmhouse to hide in before making his way to Dusseldorf. It’s where his father will go (he knows he shouldn’t hope but it weaves and settles into his bones) once the war is over.

He tries to lift his hand from his thigh, to reach for the door, but only his pinky twitches. He cannot run away, not without Schmidt’s blood on his hands.

Beside him Peggy shifts in her seat, her clothed thigh presses against his own. He can’t escape the transference of her body heat, there’s no room for him to move. Erik turns away, as much as he can in the cramped space, upper-body facing the murky window. Howard keeps the driver entertained, asking about the pros and cons of his service weapon. Erik’s half-listening and he knows Peggy is too. She’s too busy staring at the back of his head.

He wonders if she can see the scar, too deep to be hidden by his hair, that runs from one ear to the other. With a knee to his back, Schmidt pressed his face against the floor and swiped a straight razor along his scalp. Erik screamed and trembled and bled, Schmidt’s finger trailing across the open wound. He thought to himself, this is the moment I break, before passing out from the pain. When he awoke Schmidt loomed over him, smirking. “I was going to cut out a chunk of your brain,” he said, “but I have bigger plans for you.”

The truck makes a sharp right, barbed fencing in the distance, surrounding miles and miles of barracks. Erik tries to contain his breathing, to trap it beneath a thin blanket of calm, but it grows fervid like the panic in his fingertips. He should’ve eaten breakfast. No doubt Schmidt will starve him for weeks before shoving rotting meat in his mouth.

No, he thinks, swallowing the lump threatening to build in his throat. He can’t, he won’t allow Schmidt to live that long. But what if Schmidt throws him at the officer’s feet, leaving him in their mercy, keeping his distance until Erik’s too weak to stand?

Beneath him the truck begins to rattle, his power whispering in his ear. He can’t go back there but he must. He _must_.

The metal door creaks and sighs, the handle slowly reshaping. Peggy drops her hand on his knee. Erik tries to jerk away but they’re all so terribly cramped in this small space.

“ _Don’t touch me,_ ” he hisses in German.

The truck jerks lightly to the left and the solider tightens his grip on the steering wheel. “What was that?”

Howard tosses Erik a glance. “Bump in the road.”

The smell of burning flesh piles thick in his nostrils, balls of smoke rising from a section in the camp. Schmidt will make him carry bodies to the burning pit, tossing the dead and sick in one by one by one. He imagines his father, bones jutting out of his cheeks and stomach, grasping Erik’s shoulders as his father’s thin legs hover over the fire. Schmidt will hold a gun to his head, close enough that Erik won’t be able to stop the bullet, and he’ll have to do it. He’ll have to kill him.

He bends over, forehead resting on his knees as he inhales enough air to breathe. Peggy moves her hand to the back of his neck, fingers brushing against short strands at the nape. This woman wants him broken, this woman wants him dead, but this may be the last non-violent touch he ever receives. If he closes his eyes he can pretend the fingers belong to his mother, soothing him as they ride somewhere far away. “Somewhere,” his mother says, “we’ll be safe.”

The truck stops. The driver opens his door and steps out, Howard following close behind.

“Can you give us a minute?” Peggy says, her fingers lingering on his neck. The door shuts and Erik’s left with her shampoo and her stockings, her heels and her lipstick. “You don’t have to go through with this. Howard and I can take you back to London. It’s no problem at all.”

Erik closes his eyes and allows himself to drown in her false sincerity. He imagines lifting his head and asking to be taken away from this place. Peggy will smile, her fingers brushing against his scalp before she sticks her head out the door and tells Howard they’re going home. He’ll spend the plane ride with Peggy’s arm around his shoulders and Howard chatting excitedly about potential weekend plans. Maybe they’ll go back to the Thames or they’ll ride out to countryside. Maybe they’ll come with him to America. The fantasy plays behind his eyelids like a short film, the screen sizzling into white at the end.

He opens his eyes, sits up, shrugs Peggy’s hand from his hair. She’s still so close, staring down at him with watchful, wet eyes. He has to look away. If Erik sees her cry he might claw her eyes out.

“ _That’s enough_ ,” he says, his tongue rejecting all traces of English. “ _You don’t have to pretend that you care what happens to me._ ” Peggy opens her mouth to speak but Erik’s already hopping out the truck, suitcase in hand.

The world around him is vast and loud and odorous and bright. Howard smiles at him from the front gate of the camp, mid-conversation with four British soldiers. It would take nothing at all for Erik to snatch a piece of metal and jam it down his throat, but he’s saving all his power for Schmidt.

Erik looks for him in the throngs of soldiers awaiting orders but his pristinely cut uniform is missing. He reaches out for the familiar shape and weight of his coin, resting deep in Schmidt’s pockets, but his power grasps at nothingness. He searches for Schmidt’s watch, for the steel of his boots. Nothing, nothing. Schmidt isn’t here. Erik tosses Peggy and Howard a sharp look. The hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention as they motion towards him. A pair of British soldiers nod empathetically. What sort of game are playing? Where the hell is Schmidt?

Howard saunters over and Erik drags out a fistful of English. “I would like to see Klaus Schmidt,” he says. “Please tell him I’m ready.”

Howard’s smile falters, features knitting together. “What are you talking about, kid?”

Erik steps closer, the tips of their shoes centimeters apart. “I am finished playing your games. Take me to Klaus Schmidt _now_.”

The weight of Howard’s confusion builds a stone in Erik's chest, heavy enough to disrupt his breathing. He sucks in a deep breath, inhaling charred flesh as Howard places a hand on the shoulder Peggy didn’t touch. “Erik, we’re not taking you to see Schmidt we — We promised we were gonna protect you from him and that’s — What do you think we’re doing here?”

“Schmidt,” he says, mouth trembling around the only word willing to escape.

“What’s going on?” Peggy says, moving closer towards them.

She exchanges a look with Howard, a silent conversation ping-ponging between their heads. They’re lying, Erik thinks, this is nothing more than one of Schmidt’s tricks. Perhaps Schmidt’s tossed his coin and done away with his uniform and watch, replacing them with unfamiliar metal. Erik cranes his head towards the watchtowers but there’s only more British soldiers.

Where, Erik wonders, are the Germans?

“Erik,” Peggy says, “I think there’s been some grave miscommunication.” He shakes his head. He won’t be roped into their lies again. They’re putting him back in a camp. They’re putting them all in camps. “Would you like to see where you would be staying, if you choose not to come back to London with us?”

No. He doesn’t want to do anything but stand in front of Schmidt but his body ignores his mind and nods.

Peggy keeps her hand on his shoulder as they bypass the gates of the camp and head down the road. The barbed wire, the blood on the ground, a mountain of voices swell up and guide them to another camp with homes instead of barracks, fences instead of barbed wire, bushes and grass instead of long stretches of piss covered dirt. Hundreds of British soldiers flutter around them, wielding off-white boxes of medical supplies and brown bagged lunches. Their numbers are dwarfed by the crowds of prisoners huddled about the camp. Sixteen thousand, if Erik remembers the radio broadcast correctly.

Howard stops, shoulder blades knitting uncomfortably together as he looks out amongst the bedraggled masses, their clothes hanging like curtains. Gone are the striped uniforms and shaved heads, wisps of black, brown, blond, and red, growing short and wiry from their scalps. Children (Erik’s eyes widen, he thought he would never see another Jewish child again) run circles around one another, kicking up dirt and laughter as a line of women wistfully watch, tears stinging the corners of their eyes.

“This is it,” Peggy says. “What do you think?”

There are men with legs the size of bones and women without a trace of fat on their cheeks. There are children who stand with their foreheads pressed against the side of a building as they quietly weep. There are Jews who pray and those who watch with wide, unblinking eyes. There is chaos and order and woe and exultation. Erik, whose mind and heart and stomach and breath are all beating, racing, tightening, expanding at once, doesn’t know what to think.

“He should come with us,” Howard says. “This is no place for him, this —” He turns to Peggy. “This place is for people who have no other option. He,” Howard points to him, “does.”

“Erik knows that.”

He does. If this isn’t a trick, if this camp is truly for people like him, if Peggy and Howard aren’t agents of Schmidt’s and instead are the allies they’ve always presented themselves to be, he can stay here or he can return to London with them.

“Erik,” Howard says, spitting out his name with a curl of the mouth, “is fourteen. He doesn’t know what’s best for him.”

Peggy steps close enough to Howard so the contents of their argument remain between them. They bicker quiet and fervently, fingers shocking outward, nostrils flaring, cheeks full of color. Once, he remembers his parents wearing a similar stance, hissing at one another over whether to remain in Germany. “It’s only going to get worse,” his mother said. “Can’t you see? We have to find somewhere else to go.”

Erik blinks and Peggy’s hair grows past her shoulders, soft curls spiraling down. Her jaw softens, her hips widen, her fine clothes are replaced with a worn skirt that brushes past her ankles. Howard stands a bit taller, shoulders broadening, stomach expanding over his belt buckle. His slicked back hair grays and curls until they’re both the spitting image of his parents, pumped full of life and passion.

His throat tightens as he steps forward, arm outstretched to brush his mother’s hand. He’s centimeters away when her moles and wrinkles fade into a flawless stretch of skin. Peggy’s hand, not his mother’s.

Erik turns away. His head swims with the memory, so vivid he can smell his mother’s perfume on the wind. His feet move on their own accord, the ground passing beneath him as he walks farther and farther away. He brushes against an arm, stumbles over a pair of outstretched legs but he cannot stop moving. He must get away from that spectered image.

He moves towards the center of the camp, losing himself amongst the crowd of sweating, stinking bodies. Erik’s overdressed and out of place. Men, women, and children stare at the well-fed boy with a suitcase full of items that haven’t been stolen or melted down. Envy and anger flash in their hungry eyes.

Erik makes a sharp right, his body slamming into another. The impact sends him stumbling back. A delicate hand wraps around his wrist and keeps him upright. “ _Sorry_ ,” the girl says, German pinched with a hint of an accent. Her nails are chewed short, dirt packed beneath them and spreading to her fingertips. He follows the trail of skin up her small arm to her shoulders, her neck, her face. “ _I think I know you._ ”

Erik’s mind flips through a mirage of faces, of rounded cheeks curving beneath wide brown eyes. Her name crawls from a hazy memory of a cool evening, a rare moment in which Schmidt allotted him a few minutes of peace. Erik chose to wander the camp’s grounds, the soles of his feet hardening against the dirt, a girl calling for him from the other side of the fence.

“ _Magda,_ ” he says.

A smile breaks across her face. “ _Yes, I — I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name._ ” Splashes of red cover her cheeks, brown curls dripping in front of her eyes. An urge overcomes him, too great to ignore. He brushes his thumb across her forehead and tucks the locks behind her ear. Her eyes widen, her blush drips down to her neck.

“ _Erik_ ,” he says. “ _My name is Erik._ ”

Magda ducks her head and chews on her bottom lip. “ _Yes._ ” She peers up at him, eyes bright without the blanket of hair. “ _I remember now_.”

 

| |

 

“Listen to me. You do not have to stay here. You can come back to London with us and I’ll — I’ll make you a deal. You stay with Sam until the war’s over and then you can come live with me. How’s that sound?”

There’s something wild and desperate in Howard’s eyes, an invitation that’s fallen to it’s knees, crawling across the ground with clasped hands, begging. Peggy stands beside him, the three of them near the camp’s gate. Her mouth twitches, words bouncing on her tongue but she traps them behind her teeth.

“That sounds...” Like being shaken awake by explosions because Howard’s testing a new weapon, or ignoring a young woman wandering half-naked through the halls, searching for her shoes and blouse, or making sure Howard gets enough sleep so he doesn’t mistakenly put a bullet in his brain, or having his power tested and stretched every time they’re in the same room.

“Howard’s right,” Peggy says. “You don’t have to stay here but neither of us is going to tip your hand.” Howard opens his mouth but Peggy throws him a sharp look. Hands in his pockets, he buttons his lips. “No matter what you choose, know that we’ll always be here for you. If you need any help, or if you change your mind two weeks or two months from now, you only have to give us a call.”

Erik’s power spins in his fingertips, reaching out past Howard, Peggy, the guards and the camp, searching once more for the familiar weight of Schmidt. There’s nothing but a gaping emptiness.

Guilt swims in the back of his throat, coating his tongue like spilled ink. The image of Peggy, pinned to the bedroom floor, a metal bar wrapped around her neck, flashes in the forefront of his mind. Erik wants to scream. Once again, Schmidt’s toyed with his perception, tricked him into seeing things that weren’t there. Howard and Peggy want nothing but the best for him and Erik equated them to the monster who once casually threatened to cut out his tongue.

“You would still help me,” Erik says to Peggy, “after what I’ve done?”

Pity melts across her features, the corners of her mouth softening into a half-parted frown. She should hate him. She should extend her fingers and palm and strike him across the cheek. Instead Peggy tosses an arm around his shoulders and pulls Erik into a warm hug. She buries her nose in his hair as Erik’s cheek rests against her chest.

“Of course,” she says, sniffing. “I don’t…I can’t say that I’ll never blame you but…You can always call. Always.”

Erik clings to her with a desperation he’s never known before the camps. His fingers twist in the fabric of her jacket, his nose buries deep in her blouse. He can smell the thin layer of sweat on her neck, mixing with the sweet scent of her perfume. It’s a smell he wants to ingrain in his nostrils forever, in case…In case this war takes her away from him too. Behind him, Howard presses against his back, sandwiching Erik between the two of them. Happily, he drowns in their warmth and Howard’s cologne and Peggy’s shampoo and the scent of her soap lingering on Erik’s skin.

Howard’s the first to pull away, a single hand wiping his tears before they have a chance to fall. Erik wipes his cheek with the back of his sleeve, the pricy fabric soft against his skin. Peggy’s the only one who can manage a smile, watery as it is. Her eyeliner’s smudged and droplets of mascara paint the curve of her cheek, but aside from the faint memory of his mother’s smile, Erik’s never seen a more beautiful sight.

“So,” Howard says, clearing his throat. “I guess this is goodbye?”

There are sixteen thousand people in the camp. One of them might be his father, another is a girl whose fingers brushed against his own as she promised to show him around the camp. Others might have clues as to where he can find Schmidt.

Steve told him once, that his mother used to say “goodbye” was reserved for those you never planned on seeing again. Erik’s smile grows as Howard writes down his phone number and address for his home in New York, Peggy doing the same for her flat in London. When the slips of paper are buried deep in his pockets, he grabs his suitcase and says, “I’ll see you later, right?”

Howard nods and Peggy’s watery smile grows wide across her face. “Of course you will, Erik. See you later.”

 

| |

 

For the first week Erik sleeps on the ground in one of the yards, beneath Magda’s raised bed, his suitcase an uncomfortable lump of leather beneath his head. The buildings are used to house the sick and gravely wounded, a tornado of typhus spinning uncontrolled. He’s forgotten how cool the weather grows in the evening, a cruel blanket of ice, like teeth against his skin. He buries himself in a cocoon of his jackets until Magda finds him a clean blanket and drapes it over him while he sleeps.

His nights are a whirlwind of restlessness and exhaustion, tossing and turning until his brain shuts down. He dreams of hands and teeth, of nails and bullets, of blood and matted hair. When he wakes screaming, he can’t tell if the sound belongs to him or the hundreds of other nightmares that grow like weeds through the camp.

In his second week a new shipment of beds arrive and Erik earns his by doing favors for the soldiers. He runs messages, distributes medicine and food, translates for the soldiers recording names, birthdates and places of birth, and assigns himself to the room of clothing. There, he and Magda sift through dresses and pants and blouses and jackets, placing them in gendered piles.

“ _Do you ever wonder,_ ” Magda says one afternoon, “ _if the people who wore these clothes are still alive?_ ”

“ _I don’t like to think about it._ ”

“ _Neither do I but it’s impossible, isn’t it? Not to look at a torn blouse and wonder about the woman who wore it. Especially something like this._ ” She spreads a silk blouse against her front, pale fabric shimmering in orange light. “ _My mother could never afford to buy me something like this._ ”

“ _I didn’t know your people bought clothing.”_

Magda straightens up, her fingers tightening around the blouse. “ _What’s that supposed to mean?_ ”

“ _That you make everything yourself. Is that…Is that not true?_ ”

“ _No_ ,” she says, “ _we buy things. We’re not so poor we can’t afford clothes._ ”

“ _That’s not…_ ” Erik pauses. “ _I didn’t mean it like that._ ”

“ _Yes, well._ ” Magda shoves the blouse atop a pile of skirts before she turns away from him. She claws through the other pile, teeth cutting against a string of curses.

It’s exhausting, navigating conversations with a girl around his age. He assumes he’s getting better, but something always slips and leads him back to the start. Things are easier with John, a British solider of sixteen, but Erik prefers the company of Magda, even with her rough edges and sharp tongue.

Erik drops a dress in the pile of women’s clothing and grabs the pale blouse. He smooths out the wrinkles, holds it up to the light. “ _You should try it on._ ” He knows she hears him, the room’s too small for his voice to be swallowed up, but she doesn’t react until he calls her name.

Magda raises her chin. “ _What?_ ”

Erik tosses her the blouse. “ _You should try it on,_ ” he says again. “ _I bet it would look nice on you._ ”

A brush of red sweeps across her cheeks and Magda bites back a smile. She pulls her oversized shirt from her skirt and tugs it over her head. Erik spots a glimpse of long stretches of skin — her stomach, her collarbones, her breasts. He looks away before she catches him staring.

He focuses on the cracks running along the floor but he can’t dig the image of her bare skin out of his mind. He’s seen naked women, in photographs stuffed between his parent’s mattress; French prostitutes with their bare legs tossed and spread in the air, but this…This is something new. He’s never felt this warmth stirring in his stomach, temperature rising as Magda shrugs the silk over her bare shoulders, pale fabric caressing sun kissed skin.

“ _How do I look?_ ”

The blouse is buttoned up to her throat, a small bow resting at her neck. It’s a size too large, her arms swimming in the sleeves, but she looks expensive, like a woman Erik would never dare to touch but wants, desperately.

“ _You look…Very…Really nice._ ”

Another blush and Magda’s sliding her fingers along the sides of her skirt, swishing her hips back and forth. Erik imagines her fingers brushing through his hair, the weight of her breasts against his chest. A dormant feeling stirs between his legs. He clamps down on it like teeth pinching tongues.

“ _Am I really that pretty?_ ” she says, taking another spin. The sunlight drips gold flecks in her hair, brown strands set alight with the whispers of a flame.

She’s a vision. Too cracked and chipped to fill pages of a novel but she inspires something bright in Erik’s fingertips. He wants to paint, to photograph, to write sonnets about the bow of her mouth. He wants to lay at her hip and whisper Lewis against the curve of her thigh. “We can tell you a secret, offer a tonic; only / Submit to the visiting angel, the strange new healer.”

“ _You’re beautiful,_ ” Erik says.

Magda pauses, a soft smile on her mouth as she tucks her hair behind her ear. A whisper of a memory rolls down his spine, soft strands against his fingers. “ _You’re very sweet,_ ” she says, spinning once more, her skirt picking up with the manufactured wind. Ankles, calves and the bend of her knees.

 

| |

 

The soldiers wave to him as Erik exits the camp to wander the grounds around it. He carries the replica of Schmidt’s coin in his pocket, along with a few pieces of scrap metal found on the side of the road. He settles between a cluster of trees, back against a trunk as he flexes his fingers and his power. He expands the steel, tastes the nickel on the roof of his mouth, like coating his tongue with ash. He flattens it into a thin surface, curls it in a ball, splits it into three and hovers them around his head. A halo, dark and spinning.

He casts them out amongst the trees, whacks them against thin branches, hard enough for them to break. He sends them burying into the ground, forming small holes around his feet. With his legs stretched in front of him, his arm reaching out, he stretches his power as far as it will go, without the backs of his teeth gnashing together. He can feel the belt buckle of a fisherman miles away and the spoon his wife uses to stir her tea.

The residents of Bergen avoid the area around the camp, though once or twice Erik encounters a group of children that have wandered astray. They stare at him, as if they know he doesn’t belong, as if the numbers that mark him as a Jew are on his forehead instead of the inside of his arm.

“It’s your face,” John says, one evening, “if you stopped scowling so much they might come up and say hello.”

“And why would I want that?”

John laughs, bright and unapologetically loud, grass crunching beneath his boots. He’s around Erik’s height, pale blond hair sweeping over a high forehead, brown eyes constantly rimmed with red. The British have him on body duty, carrying the dead from the camp to its outskirts, to be burned in a heap. He doesn’t sleep. He smokes and drinks and rambles about growing up on a farm in Chester, with his brother who died two weeks into the war. “Infection in the leg. You should’ve seen it. The doctor’s were gonna saw it off but Tommy said, he’d rather take a bullet in the bollocks than be some gimp.”

Erik accompanies him, away from the camp and through the trees, down the hill until they reach the bodies, face-up and aligned with respect for the dead. Two other soldiers are there, cigarettes hanging from their dirt-covered mouths, the smell of smoke mixing with rapidly decaying flesh.

John hands him his flashlight and Erik strolls up and down the line, swallowing fistfuls of vomit as each pale face is illuminated by his small burst of light. Not him. Not him. Not him either. None of the bodies belong to his father.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” John says, tucking the flashlight back into his belt.

“Depends,” Erik says, on where he is.

Every other night John sneaks him into the solider’s quarters, sitting on opposite ends of his bed as the radio crackles around them. Soon, the Germans will surrender, soon, the war will be over, but there are still standing camps where his people are being worked and starved and burned to death. His faith is a faint memory, so thin he can barely grasp it, but he asks the single remaining elder to pray for his father. For peace, if he isn’t alive; for death, if he is.

 

| |

 

There are weddings almost daily. Large, public affairs where Magda grabs his hand and drags him to the front. She knows not a lick of Hebrew but Erik teaches her The Seven Blessings, sacred words rolling off her tongue and onto his shoulder, his hand resting on her lower back as she teaches him to dance. Their feet collide, she elbows him in the stomach, their knees knock together, his laughter tangles in her hair.

“ _You’re terrible at this_ ,” she says, grinning up at him as a small radio plays nearby.

The music swells, wrapping around their small area of the camp like Magda’s arms at his waist. Another reception, with little food and a single bottle of wine for those with enough energy to attend. Erik can smell the alcohol on her breath, the tip of her tongue dyed deep red. A pit of longing opens up in his stomach and Magda’s pupils grow wide. He’s going to kiss her, he can feel it in the back of his skull.

Magda’s body shifts, melts almost helplessly against him. “ _Erik_ ,” she says, the breath of his name on her tongue. His eyes flicker from hers to her mouth, her tongue swiping along her bottom lip and —

“Holy shit!” Someone, no, four people shout from the solider’s quarters.

The British, playing cards near the radio, turn the music down before growing to their feet. Magda grips his arms, brows furrowed as a round of cheers grows louder and louder. Everyone turns their attention to the solider’s quarters, the front door propped open, the windows pushed up. John bursts through the door, steel helmet in hand. He tosses it in the air, grin nearly splitting his face in two as he shouts, “Hitler’s dead! The fucking bastard’s dead!”

Confusion settles thick into the camp’s bones. Most of them don’t speak English. Magda looks up at Erik as the news travels from his ears to his brain.

“Piss. Off,” says one of the soldiers. “That’s not funny.”

John changes the radio station, turns it up. A British voice thrums through the camp. “I’ll repeat that. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.”

A calm settles over the camp as the broadcast fizzles out, bells ringing in it’s place.

“ _Hitler?_ ” Magda says, squeezing his arms. “ _What’s happened?_ ”

Erik’s grin is instantaneous and uncontrollable, the corners of his mouth spreading to reveal a wide range of teeth. “Hitler,” he says, loud enough for those around them to hear, “is dead.”

The world balloons with color. The sky, the ground, Magda’s blouse, her lips, emit blinding shades of blue and brown and pink and red, as if Erik’s been unknowingly living in black and white. He blinks and the camp is alight with exaltation. Newly wedded husbands lift their wives in the air, soldiers spin children round and round, strangers fall into one another, drenching shoulders and arms and necks with tears.

Magda’s teary-eyed and grinning, her fingers twisted in his sleeves. “ _Erik,_ ” she says, chasing his name with a laugh. “ _I —_ ”

He kisses her, his mouth crushing hard against her own. The angle’s awkward, her teeth scratch against his bottom lip, his tongue licks sloppily at the corner of her mouth. She tilts her head and moves, he moves, she moves again and they’re kissing. Imperfect, inexperienced, nervous and rushed, Erik kisses her until his body’s begging for air.

Magda’s lips are parted and slick, red coloring high on her cheeks.

“ _I’m_ ,” Erik bites his tongue. Should he…He doesn’t know what to do now.

John drags the decision from his hands. Behind him, he wraps his arms around Erik and Magda lets him go, laughing as Erik’s feet leave the ground. John lifts him effortlessly, his laughter thick against Erik’s shoulders.

“I told you,” he says, setting Erik down, “we’re gonna win the war.”

Erik’s cheeks ache, laughter rolling through him. “We’re going to win the war.”

John laughs, hearty and loud. “As we fucking should.”

Erik turns to Magda and she sidles up to him, arm around his waist. “Wine,” she says to John, English clumsy and unpracticed. “We need more.”

John dramatically bows. “Your wish is my command.”

 

| |

 

Magda laces their fingers together, drunken laughter leading them through the dark. Crooked branches brush against their shoulders, Erik's shoes catch in the dirt. “ _Hold on,_ ” he says, the corners of his mouth curved upward, “ _let me —_ ” Unspoken words settle in his throat, pushed by Magda’s tongue. She tastes of wine and bread and sweat, short fingers curving around Erik’s shoulders as she kisses him beneath an umbrella of leaves. He’s never been drunk, doesn’t recognize the warmth in his blood or the air in his head, as foreign as the valley between Magda’s shoulders, covered by her dress.

She presses against him and Erik stumbles back, head resting on a tree trunk. Her jagged nails scratch down his arms, her teeth brush against his bottom lip. “ _You’re not…_ ” She pulls away a fraction. “ _Are you going to kiss me back?_ ”

Erik blinks. “ _I thought I was._ ”

“ _No,_ ” Magda grins. “ _You were letting me do all the work._ ”

Her lips meet his and Erik tangles his fingers in her hair, brown strands caressing his palm. He massages her bottom lip as her tongue curls in his mouth, less frantic than their first kiss but with the same pinch of inexperience, at least on his end. Is he Magda’s first kiss or are there a string of boys before him? Boys with dark hair and eyes who didn’t survive the war?

Magda pushes her hands beneath his shirt, fingertips grazing a raised scar. Shaw’s knife, slicing him deep. “You can stop me at any time,” he said.

Erik grabs her hips and pushes her back, the memory scratching the inside of his eyelids. Magda furrows her eyebrows but she knows not to speak. She has these moments too, her memory flinging her back to when her body, mind, and soul were not her own.

“ _I’m sorry,_ ” he says. “ _I —_ ”

“ _Don’t apologize. Just…_ ” She stares at her hands, extends her arms outward. “ _Can I?_ ”

Erik stares at her, pale moonlight dripping into her hair, outlining her in silver. She’s otherworldly. Erik’s afraid if he blinks she’ll cease to exist. He nods and she moves in close, standing a centimeter apart, waiting for Erik to make the next move. He wraps his arms around her and leads her head against his shoulder, his chin and breath resting softly in her hair.

He can feel Schmidt’s fingers pinning him against the cool ground, his knee between his legs, his hand reaching for his throat, but if he inhales Magda’s scent, if he focuses on her weight, the memory blurs until there’s nothing but the girl and the forest in front of him.

They’re so still, so quiet, so focused on one another, Erik doesn’t hear the footsteps crunching through the dark until three pale figures appear up ahead. Soldiers, he thinks, half-drunk like they are, looking for temporary refuge from the camp. His power seeks out the metal clasp of their belts, their pouches thick with bullets, but it brushes against unfamiliar accessories. Watches, bracelets, earrings, rings. Not soldiers and not all men.

Erik tenses and Magda lifts her head. “ _What’s wrong?_ ”

Erik pushes her behind him, eyes trained on the group. Two boys and a girl, no older than they are. Their laughter sticks in their throat, rising like a tide before their eyes land on Erik, standing rigidly straight. German. Aryan. Blond hair cropped close to the scalp for the boys, long waves for the girl. His power wraps around her neck, caressing the gold of her necklace, a cross resting high on her chest.

“ _What’s going on here?_ ” says the tallest of the three. His grin’s wicked and sharp, the white edge of a knife. There’s a bottle of whiskey in his pocket, a lighter in his right hand. His friend, the other boy, tosses a packet of cigarettes in the air and Erik watches it fumble across his fingers and land on the ground.

“ _Erik,_ ” Magda whispers, her voice slicing through the dark. “ _We should go back._ ”

“ _Go where?_ ” says the second boy, twisting the box of cigarettes between his fingers.

Magda says nothing but Erik can hear her breath in her chest, her heart beating against her ribcage.

Before the war, Erik knew kids like them. Boys and girls who couldn’t handle being second best to a Jew; who delighted themselves with tales of how his people were going to burn in hell for killing their Christ, for murdering their children. They cornered him after school, fists and shoes slamming into his back and stomach, slurs hot on their tongues. “You aren’t better than us,” they said. “But you all think you are, don’t you?”

“ _You know where,_ ” says the girl, the corner of her mouth curling upward. “ _Dirty fucking Judenschwein._ ” She points to Erik’s arm, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, black ink exposed.

“ _Please,_ ” Magda says. “ _Let’s go._ ”

The first boy tuts under his breath. “ _What’s wrong with your voice?_ ”

Erik knows he knows the answer, that Magda’s accent brands her like the “Z” on her arm. The boy steps forward and Erik does the same, fingers curling into fists. “ _Don’t talk to her,_ ” he says.

The second boy laughs. “ _Like he’s going to take orders from you._ ”

“ _Erik_ ,” Magda says, panic pinched in her throat. “ _Please, let’s —_ ”

“ _Oh, god, shut-up,_ ” says the girl.

“ _I wouldn’t talk to her like that,_ ” the second boy says, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. “ _She might bewitch you._ ”

The girl rolls her eyes. “ _I’d like to see her try._ ”

“ _Me too_ ,” says the first boy, tossing his lighter to the right. The other boy catches it, red and orange bursting between his fingers. “ _Do something magical,_ ” he says, fingers fluttering, “ _and we’ll let you go._ ”

Magda grabs Erik’s arm. “ _We’re leaving_.”

Erik can smell the panic on her, potent like sweat along her collarbones. She tries to drag him away but Erik grinds his feet in the dirt. “ _Go on_ ,” he says. He won’t go with her. There’s too much of Schmidt in this group’s mouths, too much of the Nazis in their hands and eyes. He refuses to back down, to skitter away like the rat they assume him to be.

Magda’s hand tightens around his arm. “ _You’re going to get yourself killed._ ”

“ _I’ll be fine,_ ” he says, trying out a small smile for her.

His eyes leave the group for four seconds but it’s enough for the girl to act. She picks up a rock and throws, the stone cracking against Magda’s temple. Erik’s eyes widen and his world slows as Magda’s limbs tense up, muscles, blood and bones growing heavy before the light in her eyes flickers and she drops to the ground. Blood curls from the fresh wound and spills in her hair, her eyelids heavy, her pink mouth parted. Erik blinks and he’s staring at his mother, laying lifelessly on the ground at his feet. He blinks again and there’s Magda, her arms splayed out, her foot an inch away from his own.

Footsteps swell in his ears, drowning out the sound of the girl’s cruel laughter scratching against her throat. Erik closes his eyes and his arm extends behind him, his power wrapping around the gold cross and chain, bending and twisting and cutting into pale flesh.

“ _Stefanie!_ ” says the first boy as she drops to her knees, fingers scrambling against her neck. Erik doesn’t have to look to know she’s growing blue in the face, her eyes rolling back, her mouth open and gasping for air.

The second boy launches the lighter at Erik’s head. He stops it with his other hand. Eyes closed and limbs trembling he pulls it apart, flattens the brass, sharpens the edges into a blade. “ _Magda,_ ” he says, her name a prayer on his lips. Please move, please wake up. She remains still as a corpse and Erik loses his control.

The blade spins before it propels forward and bites into the second boy’s throat. His body drops, blood curling in his mouth, as he spits and spasms and chokes. The girl — Stefanie — finally gives into her fate, small droplets of blood painting her necklace. She falls forward.

Footsteps.

The first boy’s running away, arms and legs pumping fast towards the road. Erik spins around, the boy’s body growing small before Erik reaches for his watch and tugs him towards him the ground. He lands with a thump, pinned by his right wrist. The boy struggles, kicks up his legs, flails like a suffocating fish, but he cannot escape. His makeshift blade hovers behind him as Erik closes the space between them. The boy’s eyes are embarrassingly wide, fat tears running down his cheeks, an apology hot on his tongue. Is this how Schmidt saw him? Pathetic and weak, mumbling incoherently.

 _Magda_ , he thinks.

He drives the blade into the boy’s chest, twisting and shoving until his shirt’s covered in red. Erik leaves him with the blade sticking out.

Erik kneels beside Magda, presses two fingers against her neck. He holds his breath, bites down on his tongue, praying, hoping. There it is, the slow beat of her life. The weight packed inside of his chest, cracks open but fat pieces remain. As long as her eyes are closed, Magda’s life hangs in the balance.

He picks her up, one hand under her knees, the other behind her back as he carries her gently towards the camp. What is he meant to say once he gets there? That she fell and her head split open? That those three corpses have nothing to do with it? Maybe he should leave her by the gates and run back and bury them? No. Everyone will suspect Erik’s done something to harm her and he’s run away in lieu of facing his crime.

Halfway towards the camp a figure appears on the road. Erik’s power reaches out, brushing against John’s belt and ring. “Did she pass out?” he says, drunken flush brushing against his cheeks. “I told her three glasses was too much.” His smile drops when he spots Erik’s face and the red wound at Magda’s temple. “What the fuck,” he says, glancing between them. “Did you…What happened?”

Erik opens his mouth, words forming on his tongue but a sour taste builds in his throat. He hands Magda’s body to John, his arms around her before Erik rushes towards the side of the road. Vomit curls from his throat, hot and wet as he empties his stomach.

He straightens his shoulders, tastes his tears before he feels them on his cheeks. “I…” He gags. There’s nothing left but bile. “I have something to show you.”

Erik’s never seen John so tight-mouthed and serious. “Stay here,” he says, sobering up. “I’m gonna take her back to the camp and get some help but you — You stay here.”

John disappears down the road, Magda’s body bouncing gently in his arms. Erik should run. John will bring a group of soldiers who’ll take one look at what he’s done and pin his arms behind his back. They’ll throw him somewhere dark before leading him into town to be jailed. There, the parents and friends will drag him out and hang him as a warning: This is what happens to Jews who don’t lie down and take what they deserve.

John returns with Erik’s suitcase in hand, his service weapon strapped to his back. “You didn’t hurt her, did you?” Erik shakes his head. “But you hurt someone else.” 

“There are three bodies,” Erik says, “that way.”

John stares at him as if he’s trying to remember the shape of Erik’s nose, the cut of bone at his cheeks. “It wasn’t your fault, right?” He hands the suitcase over. “They didn’t give you choice.”

Erik could’ve tied their hands and wrists together, or wrapped a long strip of metal around their waists and tied them to a tree. “They didn’t give me a choice.”

John nods. “Come on,” he says, leading him in the opposite direction of the bodies. “We’ve gotta get you out of here.”

 

| |

 

There’s a man on the outskirts of Bergen who owes John a favor. “He’ll fly you to London tonight,” John says. “I don’t need to tell you to keep this between us, do I?”

“Who would I tell?” His power thrums through his fingers, caressing the steel blades of the plane, the keys in the pilot’s pocket, but he can’t feel his own skin. His mouth moves, tongue and lips numb. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll tell the others about the bodies and say you were defending yourself after they attacked Magda. You ran away when I brought her back to the camp.”

“And Magda? What are you going to tell her when,” not if, “she wakes up?”

“Whatever you want me to say.”

 

| |

 

Erik’s sweaty palm tightens around the handle of his suitcase as he stares at the door to Peggy’s flat. She told him they would always be there for him, she told him he could come back, but what if she didn’t mean it? Erik doesn’t know if he could forgive someone for pinning him to the ground, for toying with his life because their anger drove them to it. He remembers the way she looked at him, betrayed and afraid, as if the monster living inside of him finally clawed through his skin, revealing scales and nails and teeth and horns; a taste for destruction and blood.

He should find Howard but his workshop is the only place Erik knows. The Allied offices are off limits. By now, the British will have contacted them about what he’s done. He can’t risk bumping into anyone but Peggy and Howard.

Erik swallows his nerves, rubs his palm against his thigh and knocks. He straightens his shoulders, tugs at the sleeves of his jacket. He hasn’t slept in eighteen hours and the stench of wine lingers on his breath; at least, his clothes can be in order. The knob turns and Erik raises his chin, plastering on a smile. It’s weak and fading before the door opens and is wiped away when he sees the stranger on the other side.

A woman, small with red hair, stares at him. “Can I help you?”

Erik blinks. He’s walked up and down those flight of stairs hundreds of times. He knows the shape and color of the hallway, the weight of the flat’s door. He can’t have the wrong place. “Is Peggy home?”

“Peggy?” the woman says. “Oh! The woman who lived here before. About this height, brown hair?”

Yes, Erik thinks, but —

“She doesn’t live here anymore?”

“Hasn’t for about a month now. Can’t tell you what happened to her, only that she left the furniture.”

A month. Erik didn’t keep time in the camps but that’s how long he’s been away. It’s strange, separating days in his mind, from the first moment he saw Magda, to the rock bashing against her skull.

“Are you alright?” the woman says. “You look a little faint.” She reaches out to touch him and Erik moves back, his shoulder colliding with the opposite wall.

“Did she leave…” He tries to find the right word, his mind flipping through his book of English, “a…new address?”

The corners of the woman’s mouth pinch into a frown. “No, I’m sorry.” Her hand curves around the threshold of the door. She leans forward and Erik knows she’s going to try and touch him again, so he pushes off the wall and heads for the stairs. “Wait. Are you…Are you a relative? What should I tell her if she comes back?”

Tell her that Erik was here and he’s sorry for what he’s done, but he _needs_ her. “Nothing,” Erik says. “I apologize for bothering you.”

 

| |

 

Erik hopes to find Howard at the pub down the road but there’s no one but a young couple eating at the bar. He orders a classic English fry-up, hold the pork, and downs three glasses of water between the time it takes for his food to arrive. The smell settles into his nostrils, reminding him of Howard’s oil-slicked fingers and Peggy’s straight set mouth, the pair of them working on either side of her flat as Erik read at the card table.

The bartender laughs as he collects the couple’s plates. “You’re not gonna get that kinda meal in the States, are you?”

The man, twenty-something, smiles. “No, I don’t think we will.”

His girlfriend stretches her arms overhead, brown curls bouncing down her back. They’re well-dressed and out of place in the dingy pub, their flawless skin untouched by the war. “We should go soon,” she says, checking her boyfriend’s watch. “We don’t want to miss the boat.”

“You can’t leave without having a pint,” the bartender says. “Can’t get a good one of those over there either.”

“We would if we could. But the boat after this one leaves in,” she looks to her boyfriend, “how many weeks?”

“Six.”

“Right. And I don’t think they’ll refund our tickets because we wanted to enjoy one last drink.”

The bartender grunts. “Well, they should.”

Erik has another drink of water as his fork hums against his plate. He reaches inside of his suitcase and pulls out the slips of paper wearing Howard and Peggy’s handwriting. His thumb brushes against Howard’s home address. In New York. In America. Maybe that’s where Peggy’s gone and there, he’ll find them both. Erik scarfs down the rest of his food and tosses a few crumpled notes on the table. Howard left him enough money for a decent sized room on the boat, but he doesn’t need much. He’ll buy the cheapest ticket and keep the rest for New York.

It isn’t difficult to find the car that belongs to the couple, a candy red paint job and suitcases in the backseat. Erik looks up and down the empty road before his power opens the trunk and he slides inside. Knees curled to his chest he tries to imagine the shape of New York, it’s steel skyline and crowded streets, but all he can think about are bodies and blood and Magda and Peggy and Howard and hope and Schmidt and death and his mother and death his father and death and the engine purring and wheels spiraling forward and death and death and death.

 

| |

 

The car crawls to a stop and Erik carefully exits before the engine shuts off. He leaves the trunk open, bending at the knees as he moves quickly, pass the line of cars in the parking lot. The smell of saltwater brushes against his nostrils, growing thicker as he makes his way to the hulking vessel waiting along the pier. The RMS Queen Mary.

A mustached man stands before the raised platform leading up to the boat, uniformed and checking passports and tickets. Shit. Erik forgot about his passport, burned with the rest of his things, his first day at Auschwitz. There’s no other way onto the boat and there’s no way around him. If only he were small enough to curl inside of a suitcase or if he could turn invisible. How many problems would he have then?

Erik collapses onto the ground, his suitcase resting against his thigh. The couple from the pub pass him, too wrapped up in one another to notice they saw him earlier. He swallows a flash of anger, a poisonous sliver of envy. Everyone lining up is pristine and wealthy, smiling and laughing as if there hadn’t been a war at all. As if there aren’t people dying, as if his people don’t have to rebuild themselves from the ground up.

He has a destructive thought. What if he could manipulate the boat? If he reached out and grabbed hold of its black body, fingers and palms twisting until the steel rests on his arms, utterly at his mercy. He could tug it beneath the blanket of the sea, the wealthy, ignorant passengers, running along the sinking deck, screaming for their perfect lives.

_You wouldn’t truly do that, would you?_

Erik sits up. There’s no one around him and yet there’s a voice ringing in his head.

 _Not there_ , it says when Erik turns to the right, _over here_.

There’s a woman in line, beautiful and blond, checking her makeup in a compact mirror. She purses her lips and smacks them together before her hand drops to a mop of dark hair at her side. Long fingers comb through the strands, brushing them across a pale forehead. The boy tips his head up, mouth forming inaudible words before he’s moving away from the woman and heading straight for Erik.

His defenses fly up, jaw clenching, fists tightening as bright blue eyes crinkle at the corners. The boy gives him a smile. “There’s no need to be afraid, Erik. I only want to help.”

Erik pushes himself to his feet, towering effortlessly over him. “How do you know my name?”

 _Because_ , he says, only he doesn’t move his mouth, _I’m in your head._ The boy presses two fingers to his temple and Magda’s face, bathed in darkness, her hairline matted with blood, flashes in the forefront of his mind. The boy winces and steps back. Did he see that?

“I did,” the boy says. “I told you, I was in your head.”

Erik shakes his head. “That's impossible.”

 _No_ , the boy says. Once again his mouth doesn’t move. _It isn’t._

The syllables echo in Erik’s mind, soft consonants swollen with a British accent. “How?”

The boy’s eyes widen, shimmering with brightness. “Because, I’m like you.” A whisper of joy creeps into Erik’s chest, warming him from the inside. “Charles Xavier,” he extends his hand. _And I’m going to help you get on that boat_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poetic excerpt "We can tell you a secret [...] the strange new healer" is from Cecil Day-Lewis's _The Magnetic Mountain_.


	4. Chapter 4

Charles leans against the threshold of Erik’s temporary bedroom door, one hand encircled nervously around his wrist as if he’s seconds away from jumping out of his skin. Blue eyes trace the curve of Erik’s head, the width of his shoulders, the length of his fingers as Erik plops his suitcase on the edge of the bed. The Xavier's are the staying in the Grand Duplex, a gaudy cabin with two floors, three bedrooms, two baths, a balcony, and a chandelier in the dining room for holding private dinners. Erik’s never seen such excess, not even when Schmidt made him flip through photographs of golden dinner parties held in the name of the _Fuhrer_.

Charles’s mother, Sharon Xavier, wears her wealth in the cut of her dress and the bracelets dangling from her petite wrists; in the pricy heels enveloping delicate feet and her stylish haircut, modeled after silver screen stars. Charles showcases his wealth in the way he holds himself — back straight and chin up, as if there’s a string pulled from the top of his head, light enough as not to disrupt the effortless way he moves. Light on his feet. Weightless.

Erik wonders, if Charles rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, if he sheds his sweater vest and shucks his pants, will there be any inch of him that isn’t untouched by the pinch or swipe of a bruise. Maybe there’s a scar on his ankle, from where he tripped, running for a meal neither he nor his mother made. Or another on his thigh from riding a well-bred horse without the proper equipment.

Charles stiffens. “I would appreciate if you didn’t assume things about me, Erik.”

Erik shoots him a look. How could he forget the whisper weaving through his brain like the tips of fingers trailing down his arm? His power springs to his right hand, searching for any hint of metal on Charles. A smirk tugs at Charles’s mouth as Erik’s power runs from the top of his head to the tips of his shoes. Nothing.

He could drag the replica of Schmidt’s coin from his pocket and melt it down until it resembles a rope. He could wrap it around Charles’s legs, tight enough to restrict his movement, a snake trapped in a bottle, before Erik’s pinning him to the floor and pressing his knee against Charles’s neck. Charles’s eyes widen. Erik lingers on the image of him, wide-eyed and cheeks flushed, dull fingernails scratching against ungiving bonds.

“Stay out of my head.”

He expects Charles, with his fear flickering in his eyes, to run to his room but he remains, small fists clenched. “I can’t,” he says, the whisper in Erik’s mind growing to a shout. “I don’t — I can’t always control it. Any more than you can.”

Erik snorts. “You don't know anything about what I can do.”

“No,” Charles steps forward, two feet inside Erik’s room, “but you could show me.”

Erik stares at him, this boy of twelve, dark strands brushing across his forehead, arms hooked comfortably behind his back. A pair of memories hit him — Schmidt at his desk, eyebrow quirked disappointedly as Erik’s power spins in the palm of his hand, gaining a pitiful excuse for traction before it sputters out; and Steve, peering up at Erik, eyes wide as he reshapes the lock into the coin that rests in his pocket, an anchor that ties him to the blood of the earth, a reminder of the weight of chance.

Charles’s spine straightens in interest. A glittering feeling washes over Erik. Admiration. “Was that — Did you meet Captain America?”

Erik erases Steve’s face from the forefront of his mind but another image crops up. Steve, dressed in a flimsy costume with wings at his temples, surrounded by a barrage of dancing girls; Charles sitting between his mother and a man who can only be his father (They have the same pattern of freckles, blue eyes, and dark hair, though where Charles’s face is round, his father’s is severe. A wide, handsome jaw that bounces disapprovingly when the woman beside him jostles his shoulder.); Charles, clutching his mother’s hand as they melt into the crowd, waiting in the lobby of the theater, a poster rolled in his right hand; disappointment as Charles’s father returns with their hats and coats, a simple, “We have to go,” on his lips. No room for discussion.

Erik holds a vague idea of Captain America’s cultural impact. The American’s president flew out for his memorial service, standing in front of a crowd of thousands, alongside Winston Churchill and his fleshy jowls. Hours after the ceremony Time Magazine interviewed a somber, but dry-eyed Howard. Erik remembers standing with his hands in his pockets, warming his coin in his palm as the photographer’s assistants aligned a London street with lights. They were taking Howard’s picture in front of his car, a cigarette in one hand, a flask hidden in his coat. Erik stood by the sidelines, choking on his grief. After a round of photos Howard motioned for Erik to come closer.

“You mind?” he said, pointing to the photographer. The photographer shook his head. Howard slung an arm over Erik’s shoulder. No one asked him to, but Erik lifted his chin and tried on a smile. Flashbulbs temporarily blinded him before the world returned in full color.

“I’ll send you two copies,” the photographer said.

“Make it three,” said Howard.

It’s strange, seeing Steve from another perspective, seeing the glamour that surrounds Captain America.

“I knew him,” Erik admits. “He — The others —” Erik clears his throat. “They rescued me from Auschwitz.”

He’s unashamed of his time in the camps, but it’s impossible not to flinch beneath the warm weight of Charles’s pity, weaving it’s way around his consciousness, small fingers twisting rope. “Oh, Erik,” Charles says, taking another step forward.

Erik wonders, how deep does the world’s knowledge go? It’s one thing to be aware of the numbers in the paper — sixteen thousand dead here, twelve thousand dead there — but is the world aware of the suffocating size of the barracks or the heft of several fists to the face? Does it know the smell of burnt flesh or the taste of someone else’s blood on it’s tongue? Does it know the shackles of true fear; not of death but of it’s absence? Does it know what it means to starve and bleed and scream and break, only to be rebuilt and shattered again? Does Charles?

Erik waits for Charles to pick up on the whirlwind of his thoughts, but he only stares at him, as if seeing Erik anew. “I don’t —” Charles reaches out to touch him and Erik’s breath traps in his throat. _Please_ , he thinks, _don’t touch me_. Charles’s fingers curl into themselves. “What would —”

Erik should dismiss him. He has an entire suitcase to unpack, a room to settle in, but he pulls the replica of Schmidt’s coin from his pocket and says, “Do you want to see what I can do?”

A light’s restored in Charles’s eyes. He nods.

Erik’s power is instinctual. He no longer relies on the gnashing of his teeth or the furrowing of his brows to levitate the coin a foot above his palm. Charles tips his head back, lips parting as the coin spins on its side, the molecules dancing together before Erik pulls them apart. One coin becomes two, becomes three, a silver ballet of leaps and rolls, the coins moving between their heads. Charles extends his arm, fingertips brushing against the edge and Erik feels the touch in his bones. He lowers the coins into Charles’s reach but tips them away when Charles moves to grabs them. Erik’s laughter spirals uncontrolled from his stomach, the sound tugging the corners of Charles’s mouth wider.

“I can catch them,” he says, grinning at Erik.

Erik shakes his head. “No. You can’t.”

He lifts the coins a little higher and Charles jumps, knuckles knocking against the one in the middle. Erik lowers them, Charles scratches the edge, he lowers them again but Charles is too slow. Erik draws a wide circle with an outstretched finger and the coins spin around Charles’s head; the sun of their small universe. For a second Charles drops his hand, head turning as he takes in the coins moving around him. Then he’s snatching one out of the air.

Erik feels Charles’s palm against his skin, warm and enclosed, as if Charles has wrapped his hand around his wrist.

“Told you.” Charles pinches the coin between his fingers, a triumphant smile painted across his mouth.

Erik pulls the remaining coins towards him, melting them into one. The heat of his power spreads across the room and around the coin in Charles’s grip. His eyebrows knit in the middle before a gasp rushes from Charles’s throat. The coin melts, silver bleeding and twisting around Charles’s wrist. Charles watches as the metal transforms into a thin bracelet, enough that when Erik jerks his arm, Charles stumbles forward. They’re close enough for the tips of their shoes to touch. Charles’s eyes are impossibly blue as Erik uses his power to lift his wrist, the bracelet expanding and floating past Charles’s hand. Erik melds it with the coin floating to his right, a replica of Schmidt’s once more.

A wave of wonder washes over him like a high tide. “Erik. Your power is amazing.” A swell of joy, bright and sweet. He knows it’s Charles, unknowingly sinking his hooks into Erik’s brain, but he cannot push through the thick layer of positive emotion and dig out his annoyance.

Erik smiles. “And you cannot control yours.”

Charles laughs. “Not all the time, no. How did you learn to control yours?”

The tendrils of Charles’s power thickens until it snaps in half; an icicle dropping ten feet and shattering on the pavement.

Schmidt appears in the forefront of Erik’s mind, grin tugging at his mouth as a blood soaked bullet rests in the palm of his hand. Erik’s on the floor of his office, knees drawn up as he shrinks away from Schmidt’s hand on his shoulder. Schmidt laughs, says, “If you couldn’t stop the bullet from killing your mother, the least you can do is pull it apart.” His memory functions like an album, skipping to Erik, hollow-cheeked and dead-eyed, lifting a scrap of metal in a cell. It hovers effortlessly overhead. For a finger-snap of a moment, Erik allows himself the freedom to smile.

Charles stares up at him, another knot of pity woven into his throat. He opens his mouth to speak but Erik turns away. “What did I say?” he snaps, bones and muscles wound tight.

“I told you,” Charles says. “I —”

“You should leave.”

Erik won’t look at him, but he can feel Charles straightening up, chin high, mouth tight. “Alright,” he says, but he doesn’t move.

An upsurge of silence sweeps over them, Erik staring pointedly at the suitcase on his bed, Charles’s gaze fixed on the curve of his shoulders.

It’s so faint Erik almost doesn’t feel it, the whisper of a knock in the back of his brain. Charles, asking for permission to come in. Erik bites down on his cheek, hard enough to keep his head from whipping around. It’s one thing to hear and sense Charles’s presence, another for his power to form a solid weight, invisible knuckles rapping on an invisible door. Charles’s power is vast and wondrous and Erik has a sick thought — What would Schmidt do to a boy like him?

Erik envisions dismissive hands, doors shutting and locks slipping into place. A startled noise settles in Charles’s throat before his power retreats along with his footsteps, leading him out of Erik’s room.

 

| |

 

They don’t see one another until it’s nearing five o’ clock and Charles knocks on Erik’s door. “Dinner’s in an hour. Mother says you should wear something nice.”

Erik dresses in the dinner jacket Howard bought him, too long in the sleeves and too much room in the shoulders. A jacket for him to grow into. Erik fixes his hair and his cufflinks, loosens his tie and smooths his collar in the bathroom mirror. He doesn’t recognize this boy, dressed in maroon and white, readying himself for a meal that’s no doubt worth more than his father’s monthly wages.

A pang of regret hits him, twisting low in his stomach until he can feel it in the soles of his feet. His father. What would he think of him, knowing his only son survived the war? Would he kiss the top of his head, proud of his resilience, or wonder how Erik could wander freely with the weight of his mother’s death engrained in his spine? Erik’s fingers curl around the edge of the bathroom counter, scratching against the marble as his mother’s face, twisted in terror, ignites like the vomit in his throat.

Cold water splashes over his face, droplets pouring past his collarbones and swimming down his chest.

“Erik?” Charles says at the door. “Are you almost ready?”

He gives himself another glance in the mirror. Edges of panic settle at the tight corners of his mouth and in the manic light of his eyes. “I need —” He runs a hand through his hair, dark strands catching on wet fingers, his fingertips grazing over the scar running along his scalp. He feels the weight of Schmidt’s knee against his back, tastes the dirt on the floor as he opens his mouth to scream. Another ball of vomit curls in his throat and he’s down on his knees, crawling towards the toilet. “A minute, Charles, can you —” Can you get the fuck away from the door?

A shock of emotion hits Erik like a slap in the face. Of course, he thinks, fists curling against the tiles, Charles heard another stray thought meant to remain in the confines of Erik’s head. Charles leaves in a huff and Erik waits until his footsteps disappear around the corner to grip the edges of the toilet and retch, until he can taste nothing but the bitter emptiness of his stomach.

Dinner’s held in the formal dining room on the upper deck, available to first class passengers only. Erik’s never stepped foot in a room so grand, gold laced between the tiles on the floor, columns running high as if thieved from the Parthenon. A single table sits in the center, long enough to seat fifty. Charles leads him towards the middle, following his mother but checking over his shoulder to make sure Erik hasn’t run off.

His dinner jacket transforms into a second skin, suffocating him at the collar and wrists as they maneuver slowly through the mingling crowd. Sharon weaves effortlessly from one couple to another, laughing at the right jokes, frowning at the appropriate stories. She accepts condolences with her head tipped to the side and a palm to her chest, her other hand reaching for Charles. He’s always nearby, somber but composed, as almost-strangers dote on the color of his hair and the slight redness of his cheeks.

“He’s going to be very handsome,” a woman says, leaning close to Sharon. “I have a granddaughter in Connecticut who would love to meet him.”

“I’m sure Charles would love that,” Sharon says, sparing her son a glance. “Maybe in a few months when we’ve had some time to adjust.”

How strange, Erik thinks, to be surrounded by such falsity. A world so thick with manners their tongues cannot curl around the word “death”. They dance around it, mention it in the downturn of their eyes, but no one will say to the Xavier’s: Your husband, your father’s death was a tragedy. I’m sorry for your loss.

Erik blends into the crowd, a silent youth unworthy of attention unless an adult calls upon him. Sharon knows him as Max Eisenhardt, the orphaned nephew of Laura and David Eisenhardt, fictitious friends of her deceased husband. Charles has planted the idea that Erik’s staying with them until New York, where his aunt and uncle will welcome him to his new life in America. Sharon only acknowledges his presence with a sweep of her eyes across his own. He’s a necessary burden, a debt owed to a dead man, one she’s honorable enough to keep.

Dinner’s served in four courses. There are too many plates, too many utensils and glasses whose purpose Erik isn’t sure of. His mother tried to teach him how to set a formal table once, with fine china gifted on her wedding day. He pretended to listen, mindlessly following her hands as she removed a plate and replaced it with another, but Erik hasn’t retained an inch. All he remembers is the golden light of their dining room, dripping in his mother’s hair and the way her mouth curved upward when he plated correctly.

Charles is an expert. Erik watches him move from the corner of his eye, Charles’s elbows perfectly stiff, never grazing the table. A puppet positioned for dinner. He knows the difference between a soup spoon and one used for mixing sugar with his tea, there’s the butter knife and the salad fork, the knife used for cutting their generous portion of chicken and the fork for the vegetables. Charles is the picture of a miniature gentleman, his hair gelled neatly to the side, his suit perfectly cut. Erik can imagine him ten, twenty years from now, sitting near the head of the table with his arm thrown around a woman’s chair, leaning close (but not _too_ close) to whisper in her ear.

_I wouldn’t have to whisper._

Erik’s hands clamp around his dessert fork. Charles throws him an apologetic look, but it's too weak for Erik to believe it.

Dessert is a towering piece of chocolate cake, lathered in chocolate icing. Erik takes one bite and the chocolate sours in his mouth. He doesn’t catch why until he blinks and behind his eyelids is Schmidt unwrapping a bar of chocolate, the smell flooding Erik’s mouth before a gun shot rings in the air, and his mother’s body lands on the floor. Erik drowns his tongue in water, reigning in the memory.

_Are you alright?_

_Yes_ , Erik thinks, _I’m fine_.

He knows Charles feels the tremors of his panic, pressing hard against his skull. He takes another drink of water, focuses on the size and shape of the room, the weight of the chair beneath him. Slowly, he begins to catalog the silver on the table, the gold resting along wrists and necks.

There’s a shock of hysteria, sharp enough to sting him from the inside. This panic doesn’t belong to him.

“I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation to have around children,” the woman across from them says. Late forties, early fifties by Erik’s estimate, with makeup caked around her eyes.

Her husband snorts. “How old are they?” he says to Sharon.

“Twelve and fourteen.”

“See,” the man motions towards them, “they’re practically adults. It’s good for young men to know what’s going on in the world. You can’t keep them locked away from the truth.”

His wife sighs. “I suppose.”

“I’m saying,” and the man turns to his right, speaking to a group a few seats away, “none of us really know what happened.”

“There are pictures,” another man says, mustached and spectacled.

“I’m not disputing those, only the claim that so many of them were kept in work camps. Twenty thousand in one camp?” He shakes his head. “I don’t believe it for a second.”

Charles’s hand finds Erik’s knee, the warning clear in the press of his fingers. Erik’s panic boils in the volcano of his stomach, mixing with his ever present rage.

“I hate to agree with Roger,” says another woman. Young, brunette, mole drawn on the spot below her left eye. “But he may have a point. The press has been sensationalizing this whole war.”

“And think about it,” Roger says. “If they truly rounded up millions of Jews, why didn’t any of them revolt? If twenty thousand of them were in one camp, why didn’t they fight back?”

His wife hums behind her teeth. Erik feels the vibrations against the back of his neck, a set of teeth raking over his skin, opening him up like the edge of Schmidt’s blade. He blinks and he’s strapped to a slab of metal, Schmidt looming over him, pumping novocaine into his right arm. He blinks again and he’s stuffed in that hot box of a closet, bare feet scraping against the stone floor, knuckles split open and bleeding in the dark.

People — his people — did fight back, but riots were never worth the pool of blood or the bodies hung in the center of the camp. They may have buckled beneath the weight of the Nazi’s power but his people were not — are not — cowards.

“Either way,” a third man says, “it’s a tragedy.”

“Yes,” says Roger, “though we have to consider the other side of things.”

Copper floods in his mouth, Erik’s tongue stuck between his teeth. Charles’s hand on his knee tightens. His voice hums in his head. _Erik, please calm down._

“Do you mean the Germans?” says his wife.

Roger nods. “They felt threatened and rightfully so.”

The blood in Erik’s mouth pulses towards his ears, severing him from the conversation. He can still see the inky words forming on Roger’s lips, excuses rolled out over dinner, for the Nazi’s and their atrocities. Their side of the table lends their full attention, heads nodding in agreement. No, Erik wants to shout, you are all ignorant fools.

His dessert fork clatters on the table, his power thick in his fingertips. One swipe of the hand is all it will take to send the fork hovering above Roger’s right eye. How long, he wonders, will he spit his rhetoric then?

_No, Erik. I won’t let you._

“You don’t _let_ me do anything,” Erik hisses, low enough for his words to remain between them.

Charles shoots him a hardened look, his fingers braced on Erik’s knee. _Calm down._ Charles’s mouth twitches. _Please_.

Roger laughs. “Admit it!”

“Oh, alright,” says the woman with the mole. “I did feel a little bad for them. Only because in some of those photos, those Germans,” a blush crawls up her neck, “they’re very handsome.”

Erik’s dessert fork slips from the table, hovering by his right knee. He could split the fork into two or, his power wraps around Charles’s fork. Perfect.

“Erik,” Charles says. _Erik_ , Charles thinks.

He can taste the rage in the back of his throat, hot like fire on his tongue. Erik blinks and there are bodies in the dirt, pale and wide-eyed, blood pooling at the mouth. He won’t have to kill these overdressed and overfed idiots, but he can drill the truth into their skulls.

The table erupts in another round of laughter and Erik’s power tightens around the forks. Charles’s voice slivers into his head but he thinks of closed doors with locks upon locks and kicks him out. Charles’s hand leaves his knee.

Erik will start with Roger first, then work his way down to the woman with the mole.

His fingers flex and his nostrils flare and he’s standing in the living room of the Xavier’s cabin.

Erik’s power lashes out but there’s nothing to cling to. The dessert forks are missing and Charles is standing in front of him, bent over as he catches his breath. Charles tilts up his head. He’s covered in sweat, blue eyes blown wide and Erik _knows_.

His fist curls in the front of Charles’s shirt as he shoves him against the cabin’s door. Charles’s fingers knot in the sleeves of Erik’s jacket but Erik pins his arm against Charles’s neck. “What did you do to me?” he says, words cutting against his teeth.

Charles is an inch off the ground, feet kicking against the door, nails digging into Erik’s arms. The sweat along his forehead drips down the curve of his pale cheeks, skin drained of color. Whatever he’s done to Erik has exhausted him, made him a puppet in Erik’s hands.

And what has Charles done? Seconds before they were sitting in the dining area, two dessert forks hovering on either side of Erik’s legs.

Erik presses his arm harder against Charles’s neck. “Tell me,” he all but growls, their noses inches apart.

Charles opens his mouth to speak but the words are trapped beneath the weight of Erik’s arm. _I stopped you_ , he says, the voice in Erik’s head worn out and thin.

“How?” Charles shrugs and Erik presses harder, a choking noise wrenched from the back of Charles’s throat. “How?” he says again.

 _I don’t know,_ Charles thinks between a few coughs. _I wanted you to stop, so I thought about it and…_

“What?”

_You got up from the table and left._

Charles’s eyes are wide and sincere, nails clutching Erik’s jacket, his feet dangling in the air. Charles wasn’t merely in his head, he buried his power deep into Erik’s agency, clasping it tight enough to dim his consciousness and use Erik’s body as he pleased. His skin and bone and muscle and blood, all of it beneath Charles’s control and there was nothing — is nothing — Erik could do to stop it.

Erik releases his arm from Charles’s throat and steps back to take in the full picture of him. Charles lands on his feet, bending at the waist. “I didn’t mean to,” he says through a cough. “I wanted — You had to stop and I — I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“I told you,” Erik says, limbs trembling against his will, “to stay out of my head and you —” _You turned my body against me._

“No…I — Maybe, but Erik —”

Erik snaps. “Stop talking.”

Charles’s mouth clamps shut.

Erik wills his body to stop shaking but once again, he’s without control. He should wrap his hand around Charles’s neck and squeeze until his eyes roll in the back of his head, but what will Charles to do him then? Command him to pull his own limbs from his body?

“I would never.”

Erik grits his teeth hard enough to sting. He draws himself up, takes two steps forward and looms over Charles. “I am going to collect my things and leave. You will not contact me again and you will stay out of my _fucking_ head.”

Charles’s face falls, void of fear. “I’m sorry. Please don’t…” He grabs Erik’s arm but Erik jerks out of his hold. “Please don’t leave.”

Erik’s eyes narrow. “If you try to stop me, I promise you, I’ll wring your neck. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but…But I would like for you to stay.”

Erik’s fingers curl into themselves as he stares at Charles’s wide and sincere eyes, apologetic and pleading.

“No,” Erik says, “I won’t.”

 

| |

 

The third class accommodations are suffocatingly small. A pair of bunk beds covered in woolen sheets, pressed against the left wall with little room left for movement. There is no desk, no dresser, no lingering smell of wax candles and fresh flowers, only the scent of cigarettes and sweat from the young man sprawled on the bottom bunk.

William Fleischer, eighteen, armed only with a lopsided grin on a wide, pale mouth, and a barrage of freckles dancing across his arms. He’s shirtless, the first time they meet, a bottle of wine in one hand, a lighter in the other. Erik waits by the door for an interrogation — Who the hell is he and why is he in William’s cabin? — but William only reaches beneath his pillow and pulls out a worn packet of cigarettes, tossing them at Erik’s feet.

“Take two,” he says.

William smokes the same brand as Howard, unfiltered and expensive, but with none of Howard’s grace. Within days he powers through three packs, ashes dripping along the inside of his fingers, burns settling in the corners of his mouth. His lighter breaks and he bites at his callouses, bouncing his right leg enough to rattle their bed frame. Erik fixes it while he sleeps.

In the morning William watches the flame burn wondrously. “I owe you. Don’t let me forget.”

Erik wonders if William notices he has yet to say a word; if he cares that their conversations are weighted in his favor. Maybe, Erik thinks, but probably not. William just likes to hear himself talk.

Erik learns he’s the middle child of seven, three older sisters and three younger, born to a German man and an English woman. Their parents raised them in Canterbury before they moved to Darmstadt, an explanation for the pinch of German on an otherwise English tongue. William tells him of summer afternoons posing in their grassy backyard for his mother, the artist, fingers twisted around his sister’s wrists, the seven of them unable to remain still for a portrait. Of winter evenings in his father’s study, swallowing scotch as his father combs the paper for work.

When William speaks of the war it’s in minuscule snippets — the books his father removed from their library, the department store his mother chose to boycott. “Some good came out of it,” he says, lined up outside the communal showers. “My father found work at the University.”

Erik showers with his back turned and left arm tucked against his side. He dresses quickly and undresses in the dark. The Xavier’s are the only occupants of the RMS Queen Mary who know he’s a Jew. Erik isn’t ashamed, but he isn’t dim enough to broadcast it. The war may be over but the ill sentiment remains. His people didn’t deserve to be rounded up and gassed, but someone had to put them in their place.

There are rumors, baseless but prevalent, of Jews who’ve managed to sneak onboard. They live in the hull of the ship, sleeping and sweating in the boiler room, surviving on stolen scraps from the kitchen.

“Liam,” one of the cooks, “swears he saw one,” William says, as if his people are goblins, hiding in the dark, showing face in time to rummage through the trash.

At night, Erik stares at the off-white ceiling of their cabin and tries to work out how to keep Charles from weaving his way into his thoughts. He dreams of barbed wires and locked fences, of steel doors with oil slick around the knob, but with all his precaution Erik’s startled awake by the faint whisper of someone else’s voice in his head. Sometimes it’s Charles, with Erik’s name weighing heavy on his mental tongue, other times it’s Howard’s laughter, Peggy’s euphonious tone, or Magda whispering his name against the curve of his ear.

In his dreams, the image of her grows like a garden, brown hair splayed amongst strips of grass. Magda’s wearing the dress of a dead woman, laced fabric dripping from sharp collarbones, sunlight catching on her eyelashes as she turns her head. Erik reaches out and strokes the curve of her cheek. Magda touches his wrist and smiles. Fat droplets of red pool at the corners of her mouth, dripping past her chin and staining her dress. Blood on her teeth and bursting from her temple, skin splitting open like shattered glass. Her grip on Erik’s wrist tightens, nails forming hooks in his flesh, fingertips sticky with blood.

 _You left her,_ Erik hears Charles say. _You left her to die._

Erik forces himself upright, legs dangling over the side of the top bunk, half-moons carved in the pale sheets of his mattress.

 _What did I say?_ he thinks, loud enough for the words to bounce in his brain. Charles sends nothing in return.

“You talk in your sleep,” William says.

Erik doesn’t respond.

 

| |

 

There are other boys, British, Scottish, German, with hair cropped close to the scalp and mouths like gaping bruises carved above their chins. Their mothers can’t control them and their fathers refuse to try, unleashing a wave of imprudent behavior: fist to the jaw, nail to the scalp, knee to the back, shoulder to the wall. Most nights they gather in the stock room, crowding around an excitable pair, bare-knuckled, bare-chested, and beating each other bloody. Or so Erik’s heard.

William weasels his way into their ranks and returns to their cabin with stories woven between the wounds on his cheek. “It’s fun,” he says. “You should join us sometime.”

Erik rolls his sleeves to his elbows, twisting his arms toward the light. He surveys the scars along his arms and wrists, imagines the ones on his ankles and thighs, shoulders and torso. Knife marks, broken bones, cigar and rope burns. He has enough to create a sprawling map of desecrated countries and has no desire to add more.

There are times William accompanies him to the dining hall and times Erik eats alone. He keeps his head down, tucked between the pages of his book. The other boys watch him, unable to swallow his willful isolation, his ever-present silence. They peer over his shoulder as Erik scribbles lines of English on his few sheets of stationary, stolen from the Xavier’s cabin. He doesn’t need Charles’s power to know what they think of him, the boy willing to slave over work when there’s no one around to check it.

The tension between them grows until it’s palpable, a weight resting on Erik’s shoulders. William warns him of the whispers crowding around his name, the threats made behind flimsy cabin doors. Erik knows what it’s like to have a spotlight hanging overhead. He isn’t afraid. He refuses to be.

Some mornings Erik lingers in the bathroom, smoothing the lapels of his blazer in one of the cracked mirrors hanging above the sinks. He runs a hand along the curve of his jaw, faint hairs pricking his palm, a whisper of a beard creeping out. Erik can’t remember the light in his father’s eyes but he remembers the reddish-brown beard surrounding his mouth, full and unruly. His mother used to stand between his legs, fingers tipped beneath his father’s chin as she trimmed away the excess. The foggy memory hits him low in the stomach, fingers twisting against the sink. What was the color of his mother’s lipstick? The fabric of his father’s favorite jacket?

The bathroom door swings open. Heavy footsteps slide against the linoleum as the smell of stale vodka fills the room. Erik lifts his head and meets a pair of green eyes in the mirror, fat cheeks flushed pink, a drunken scowl tugging at a thin mouth. Fergus.

The others follow at Fergus’s heels, bending easy beneath his boot against their necks. He’s a king in a land of half-brained boys, bringing him offerings of blind pity and ill-deserved praise, laying them at Fergus’s inwardly turned feet.

Fergus shoves his shoulder against Erik’s back and Erik’s stomach slams into the edge of the sink.

A sharp, “Oomph,” falls from his mouth.

Fergus laughs and does it again, this time hooking his foot around Erik’s ankle, pushing him until his nose is centimeters away from cracking against the faucet.

Erik’s anger slides from his fingertips and into his throat, painting something sour on the back of his tongue. Fergus’s laughter rings in his ears but he shakes it off. He focuses on his power, curling around Fergus’s neck and waist and ankles, seeking out any inch of metal. There’s nothing but his belt buckle. Erik can use it to whip the leather from Fergus’s waist and snap it around his neck.

Erik extends his right arm, fingers flexing as his power wraps around Fergus’s belt, a familiar tug pulsating beneath his palm before the urge fizzles out. His eyebrows furrow. Fergus kicks at his calf and Erik tries again. His power brushes against the buckle before it curls back into his blood, retreating behind a mental wall that appears in the forefront of his mind, sudden, impenetrable, and severing the veins connecting his power to his fingertips, his stomach, his teeth.

Charles.

He’s done something to him. Planted a block in his brain to keep his power from lashing out.

Fergus swats at the back of Erik’s head. His knuckles graze the raised scar running from one ear to the other before dirt-speckled fingers curl in Erik’s hair. He tugs him back. Erik’s neck twists awkwardly as the swell of Fergus’s stomach presses against his back.

“You think you’re better than us,” Fergus says, jerking Erik’s head to the left. “Don’t you?”

Erik’s brain rattles in his skull as Fergus’s dull nails pinch the flesh of his scalp. Through the mirror Erik watches his nose begin to scrunch, his eyes start to narrow, his mouth on the cusp of twisting in agony. He schools his features flat. He knows the scent of a monster, the way their nails and teeth grow in the dark. Fergus is a microscopic threat, small enough to be crushed in his hand, if only he had his power.

“Answer me,” Fergus says with another shake of his fist, another snap of Erik’s neck. “Or are you stupid?”

Erik’s jaw tightens as Fergus fists the sleeves of his blazer. The hint of Howard’s wealth remains in the ungiving fabric and the neat gold stitching along the collar.

Fergus, like the boys who surround him, disciples to a false prophet, owns nothing that belongs to him. His jacket was once his father’s, his shoes, stolen, his belt, found. His parents have gambled the last of their wealth for a better life across the pond, casting their family into another net of poverty, more wrung than the one before.

Fergus has seen Erik’s scars but he cannot slip into Erik’s memory and trace the sharp edge of his ribs. He cannot taste the dead skin along his lips or the ice on the bare soles of his feet. He knows nothing of true starvation, of charred flesh, of corpses the size of dolls. Erik says nothing. He has nothing to prove. Not to Fergus, not to any of them.

His lips press together as Fergus spins him around, shoes slipping across the damp tiled floor. Their noses are inches apart, Fergus’s breath hot against his mouth. He tugs at Erik’s sleeves and says, “You’re going to give this to me.”

This. Erik’s blazer. Carefully fitted to the span of his shoulders and the length of his arms. “Necessary excess,” Howard said, his tailor kneeling at Erik’s feet, pins pushed between his teeth.

With his fingers twisted in the lapels of his blazer, Fergus rips Erik’s collar down his shoulders, woolen sleeves bunching at his elbows. Erik’s hands curl into fists, his power a dull ache in the meat of his palms. He tries to push it out, but it remains beneath his skin, lazy and unbothered by the hulking boy in front of him, baring his teeth.

There are no bonds Erik can feel, no rope around his brain, but Charles must have put something there.

Fergus’s nails scratch at Erik’s arms as his blazer rolls down his back. “Take it off,” he says, teeth gnashing together.

Erik knows what will happen next. Fergus will have him on his stomach, a pool of acrid wetness seeping into his shirt, arms wrung behind his back. A fish caught in a noose. The fabric slips past his wrists and Erik reacts secondary to the way he knows how.

His fist collides with Fergus’s neck, a sloppy punch meant for his jaw. Fergus jerks to the left and Erik hits him again, a fist to the chest, but without enough power for a sizable impact. Fergus smirks, one hand around Erik’s arm, the other on his shoulder. He pushes and Erik stumbles back before Fergus slugs him in the jaw.

There’s another punch, a hiss, a knee to the groin, wind trapped in the chest, a stomach caving in, a throbbing in the right ear, a tooth caught on the edge of a lip, a forehead slick with sweat, a finger bent back, a laugh in the throat, before the world tilts and Erik’s limbs grow heavy, slumping forward before he sinks to the bathroom floor.

Fergus wrenches him up on his knees and snatches the blazer from Erik’s arms. It’s tight around his shoulders, short at the waist, seams straining at the elbows. Fergus parades in front of the mirror as if his thick limbs aren’t stuffed inside of it.

Fergus flexes his jaw, a faint bruise blooming at his cheek. “Not bad,” he says, kicking Erik’s ankle, “but you’ll have to try harder.”

 

| |

 

It isn’t until that evening, with William snoring on the bottom bunk, that Erik reaches out for the replica of Schmidt’s coin. It’s meant to be resting in the pocket of his trousers, tossed carelessly near the cabin’s door. He finds nothing but his zipper, twisted beneath the grey. Erik’s spine draws him up, eyebrows knitting as he extends his fingers, his wrist, his elbow, pushing into the other trouser pocket. Nothing.

A pinch of panic brushes against the edges of his teeth. Where the hell is it?

His power weaves beneath the leather weight of his suitcase. He hasn’t tucked it between his book or beneath his button-downs. He hasn’t let it slip between the mattress and the wall. He hasn’t —

His blazer.

The right pocket.

Erik’s power stretches to the hall, the stock room, the kitchen, his coin flipping once, twice, three times in the air. A sweat-slicked palm brushes against the serrated edges, a thumb presses against the coin’s face. Fergus’s pale fingers, caressing Erik’s coin as if it’s his own. The roof of Erik’s mouth dries up, his tongue growing fat enough to choke.

Without the replica of Schmidt’s coin, the weight of the camps will dissolve until there’s nothing but the ghost of blood in his mouth. Erik won’t remember the steady weight of Schmidt’s hand on his bare ankle or the deviant glint in his pale eyes. He’ll forget the ease in which the guards roamed the camp, gun in one hand, baton in the other, nostrils flared, dogs on the hunt. He’ll forget the smell of his mother’s hair, the sound of his father’s laugh, the shape of his bedroom above his father’s shop. He’ll forget the warmth of Steve’s fingers around the broken lock, Peggy’s palm clutching his coin, Howard flipping it in the air as Erik changes it’s shape mid-movement.

But what is he meant to do? Charles has ripped the acidity from his power. Before, Erik could use his coin to slice through Fergus's hand. Now, there's nothing but the heft of his two fists and Fergus has already shown that, bare-knuckled, Erik isn't much of a threat.

Erik drops from the top bunk, bare feet thudding against the floor.

“What are you doing, Max?”

William shifts onto his side, sheets pooled around his ankles, threadbare pants clinging to the block of muscle around his hips. He's half-naked, pale shoulders shimmering in the dark. Erik doesn't need the light to spot the bruise along Williams's torso, or the teeth marks set deep in his shoulder. He's a canvas of violence, a willing weapon of flesh and bone.

“I need — Would you teach me how to fight?”

William’s mattress sighs as he sits up. “Why?”

Erik shrugs. “You owe me.”

He feels the weight of William’s gaze dripping over his slight shoulders, his split lip, his oversized shirt and trousers. He’s grown since his first night at the DP camp but he’s no match for William. Without the strength of his power, billowing and savage, he’s no stronger than the boy who arrived at Auschwitz: vulnerable, confused, and desperately hopeful.

William kicks his feet to the floor. “You're not planning to kill me in my sleep, are you?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he says, standing. “I'll teach you.”

 

| |

 

William swings with his shoulder, knuckles slamming into the pile of pillows they've nailed to the cabin wall. The cotton gives beneath his fist, feathers spilling from the bottom, a cascade of filmy white spreading about the floor.

“Like that,” William says, making way for Erik. “You can't be afraid to hit hard.”

Erik scowls. “I’m not afraid.”

Since asking for William’s assistance their conversations have grown from Erik answering with a single word, to stilted sentences shuffling awkwardly between them. William isn’t used to working for a response and Erik isn’t willing to freely the dispense the words tangled in his throat. The last time he did, he unwittingly gave up his mind and limbs, to a boy whose fingers remain clenched around his agency.

Erik shields the bottom-half of his face, arm extending outward like a bullet. His knuckles indent the pillow, the marks fade with a blink.

“Again,” William says.

Erik remembers the give of Charles’s throat beneath his arm, feet floating in the air as Erik pinned him to his cabin door. He remembers pale fingers clawing at his wrist, a faint tickle brushing against his brain. He remembers the flood of his own fear as he realized the breadth of Charles’s power, hidden behind pink cheeks, wide eyes, and a sickly sweet layer of earnestness.

Erik punches the pile of pillows twice, imaging his fist slamming against the curve of Charles’s cheek. At least he’s left him enough rage for this.

They leave the pillows attached to the wall. Erik sleeps with his head on his suitcase, William on a bundle of sweaters knitted by his oldest sister.

Erik isn’t afraid of Fergus but William warns him to stay inside of their cabin. “You’ll only rile him up, and you aren’t ready to fight him. Not yet.”

For three days William brings Erik breakfast and dinner, each meal more extravagant than the last. Rolls doused in butter, cakes dripping with cherries, generously carved turkey, a healthy portion of mashed potatoes, all reminiscent of Erik’s dinner in the first class dining room, down to the stolen silver. William watches him over their shared bottle of wine, waiting for questions Erik doesn’t care enough to ask. If William wants to raid the first class kitchen and share his spoils with Erik, he won’t complain.

“Where did you learn to speak English so well?” William says, his glass of wine dangling between his fingertips.

Erik’s hand tightens around his fork, Schmidt’s voice swelling in his mind. (“Is it impossible for your tongue to curve around that word? Would you like me to cut it out?”)

“My parents moved to London before the war.”

“What happened to them?”

Erik shoves another round of mashed potatoes in his mouth, forces them down with a gulp of wine. “They were killed in the Blitz. I was away at school.”

He cannot imagine this fictional painting of his parents, their bodies lost in the rubble of a collapsed building, eyes wide and covered in dust, but he wants to believe it. For Max, his parent’s deaths were swift. A finger snap of panic before their world fell to pieces. There was no lingering sense of dread, no suffocating ride in a filthy train carriage, no false hope dangled in the shape of a chocolate bar.

William downs his glass and says, “Maybe it would’ve been better if they stayed in Germany.”

A laugh hooks in Erik’s mouth, so sudden it startles even him. It’s a slip of a hysteria, a gushing sound that sprays up like a geyser. Erik tries to swallow it, drown it in the bottom of his glass, but he cannot grip the noise rolling from his mouth. William watches him through it, amused. A drop of anger swells in Erik’s stomach. There’s nothing funny about this, but Erik can’t stop laughing.

The sound dies down and he has another drink, pointedly ignoring William’s gaze. “Germany is no better,” Erik finally says, bursting the sweeping silence.

William says nothing, only pours himself another glass and tops Erik off, giving him a little less than before.

 

| |

 

William’s hand is a collar around his neck. He leads Erik down a narrow hall, around the corner, to the stock room, where three boys and a girl linger outside. Erik recognizes the girl as one of the twins who sleep three cabin doors down. Elizabeth, he thinks, or maybe Cecilia. Her dark hair rests messily across slight shoulders, a narrow nose high on a round face. If he squints and darkens her eyes, Erik can almost trick himself into believing she’s Magda. Her arms are crossed in a silent, gentle warning. Once more, Erik is in over his head but nothing she says can leash him.

His mind draws him back to the forest in Bergen, Magda’s trembling hand around his wrist, the fading pinch of hope in her voice. How naive she must’ve been, to believe that there’s anyone who will allow them to run without consequence. Three corpses flash in his mind, pale and rotting in the dirt, limbs twisted like his mother’s body. Guilt, supplied by Charles no doubt. Erik thinks of closed doors and brick walls, shutting him out.

There’s a crowd in the stock room, bodies flush with sweat and packed shoulder to shoulder. Erik takes the lead, William’s hand falling from his neck as he pushes towards the center of the room. He can sense the metal pinning the shelves to the wall, the cans of food resting atop them, the watches on several wrists, the belts around slim waists, a wedding ring or four, bags of coins trading hands — “I’m betting on you,” William says in Erik’s ear. “Try not to lose.” — and one coin in particular.

The crowd forms a circle, the space in the middle large enough for a pair of bodies to thrash one another around. Flecks of red and black dance across floor, a wild pattern leading to triangular positioned feet, bare like the skin of Fergus’s fleshy torso. There are bruises on his stomach, a few faded wounds on his arms. Fergus wears them with pride. They’re a warning, a threat, a testament to all that Fergus has endured and yet, he remains.

“I’m not removing my shirt,” Erik says, mouth inches from William’s ear.

“You have to. Shoes too.”

Erik sets his jaw. “I’ll take off my shoes,” but he won’t expose himself to this pack of animals, screaming and jeering like Romans in a coliseum, hungry for torn flesh and severed bones.

Fergus walks a quick circle inside of the crowd, chin up and screams bouncing against the high ceiling. The crowd cheers, fists beating against their chests in an unruly rhythm. Erik wonders, does this make Fergus the gladiator or the lion? Their eyes meet across the small space, Fergus’s gaze narrowing in on him, a hunter picking it’s prey. Perhaps, he is the lion.

Erik’s power stretches beyond his fingertips, stroking the edge of his coin in Fergus’s pocket. Another boy is wearing Erik’s blazer, the sleeves too long with too much room in the shoulders. He can’t be more than twelve, a hint of innocence in the slight flush to his cheeks.

Fergus grins when he catches him staring. “Didn’t think you’d be dim enough to face me.”

His loyalists cackle in response.

“I want my blazer,” Erik says, “and my coin.”

“You mean this?” Fergus pulls out his coin. Erik can feel the heat of his flesh, the grooves of his fingerprints. His hand flexes. If only he could use his power to snatch the coin away from him. “You know they don’t accept Nazi currency in the States.”

“Give it to me.”

Fergus tosses the coin in the air, flipping it once, twice, before snatching it up. “I’d rather fight you for it.” Another resounding applause from the crowd. “This and the jacket.” Fergus tucks the coin back into his pocket.

Erik kicks off his shoes, his socks, tossing them behind for William to grab.

“Are you sure about the shirt?” William says. “He could use it against you.”

Erik nods. “I won’t let him get that close to me.”

William clasps his shoulder, a gesture that lingers too long to be reassuring. Like the last hug dispensed between he, Peggy, and Howard. A squeeze punctured by finality.

Erik steps into the circle and allows his gaze to quickly wander around the room. Most of the faces blur together, a distorted cloud of cream, but there are some figures who stand out. Men who are too old to watch children fight, stand towards the back with their cigars and liquor, passing two bottles between them. Girls who’ve done their make-up and hair, as if meeting a boy for a film, stand with their hands awkwardly clasped at their laps, a drip of elegance in a hole like this.

Towards the wall, exchanging wads of cash, are three faces Erik remembers from his first night on the ship. Roger and two others, who sat at the lengthy dining table in first class, and excused the Nazi’s for their crimes. The night replays in Erik’s mind and a swell of anger grows inside of him like a fountain. A whisper of power wraps around his wrist, brushing once more against the coin in Fergus’s pocket, shaped with the lock Schmidt used to trap and test him, his freedom a flick of the wrist away.

“You going to stand there all night, or are you going to hit me?” Fergus says.

Erik sets his jaw and curls his fists, the pair of them blocking his face. “You first.”

 

| |

 

Fergus wins.

The applause of the crowd is deafening, matched only by Fergus’s victorious wail. He looms over Erik, feet on either side of his legs, arms stretched towards the ceiling, chin tilted up. If Erik’s ribs weren’t cracked, if his right eye wasn’t swollen shut, he could kick Fergus in the backs of his knees, sending him toppling down, but Erik can barely find the energy to inhale.

Fergus kicks Erik’s ankle, one last blow before he turns to the boy in Erik’s blazer. The boy removes it and Fergus tosses it over his shoulders, wiping his bloody lip with the sleeve. “Fuck you,” Erik wants to spit, but when he pushes himself to his elbows, words stinging his tongue, his shoulders tremble and he’s crashing back down to the floor.

He should allow his shame to grow thick enough to suffocate, a clot in the lungs, blocking his air supply. He’d struggle for breath, fingers clawing at his throat and chest, mouth gaping open until the last whispers of oxygen dissolve in his brain. How will his body look then, lifeless and soaked in his own blood and sweat, his scars visible to the world? Will he inspire fleeting amounts of pity? A gentle clasp of the hand over a parted mouth? A swift, “Poor boy,” before attentions are turned to other matters — more important matters than another dead Jew? Will Charles release his true identity? Tell the word that Erik Magnus Lehnsherr died in an adolescent scuffle over stolen items? Will the news reach Peggy? Howard? Magda? Will it reach _Herr Schmidt_?

How delighted Schmidt will be, to have all his suspicions confirmed. Erik’s power is wasted on the weak.

“Come on, son,” an English voice says, two sets of hands pulling Erik to his feet.

On his right, William throws an arm around his waist and fixes Erik’s arm around his shoulder. On his left, the pungent scent of cologne and wine.

“Really,” Roger says, “I understand a boy’s urge to look for a bit of trouble, for something exciting and new, but you could’ve gotten yourself killed. What would Sharon do then, hmm? What on earth would she tell your parents?”

His words barely escape his lips, so quiet Erik isn’t sure he spoke them at all. “My parents are dead.”

“What was that?” Roger says. “What did he say?” he says to William.

William situates his hand on Erik’s hip, fingers blooming across an infant bruise. “I didn’t hear anything.”

 

| |

 

Erik wakes and finds Charles across the room, feet pulled on a chair, a comic book resting on his thighs. He turns the page, inciting a flurry of muted colors, yellows and browns and reds and blues, panel after panel of blurred action.

“You’ve been out for hours,” Charles says, eyes trained downward. “The physician says you’re concussed. He told us you might not wake until we reached New York.”

Why? The word rests heavy and unspoken on a swollen tongue. Erik laps at the roof of his mouth and tastes a layer of blood, coated there from when he nearly bit his tongue in two. Behind his eyelids he replays the fight, Fergus’s scowl as Erik socked him in the shoulder, his gaping pit of laughter as Erik stumbled back, narrowly missing a punch. He remembers the acidic taste of his adrenaline, the creeping awareness of his fear as Fergus hit him, again and again, his body shutting down, caving to the blows. He remembers the wide-eyed, stricken look on William’s face as Erik tripped over his own feet and landed with his skull against the ground.

William. He must have brought Erik to the Xavier’s cabin, but how could he have known Erik arrived, on the ship, with Charles?

“Mr. Pryce recognized you,” Charles says. “You know, the man you wanted to murder at dinner? He saved your life.”

Erik’s mind reflexively lashes out. _Stay out of my fucking head_. He sharpens the edges of his words, shapes them into knives and nails, prickly to the touch. A headache spreads between his eyes, but it’s worth it to see Charles wince.

Charles massages his temples before his gaze rounds on Erik. “I don’t think you’re in any shape to make threats.”

 _Because you’ve done something to me_ . _You’re blocking my power_.

Charles’s eyebrows furrow. “No, I’m not.”

 _You are._ _Which is why — why —_ Why he couldn’t rely on his power to dismantle every shred of metal in the stock room, shaping cuffs for Fergus’s ankles and wrists, pinning him to the wall as Erik took his time, slicing him open from the torso up.

Charles’s shoulders tense, the image of Fergus weeping and bleeding, hot in Erik’s mind. “That’s horrible, but I would never take your power from you. When you told me to stay out of your head, I obliged. Although, that didn’t stop you from trying to get into mine.”

_I don’t know what you’re talking about._

“Of course you don’t.” Charles returns to his comic, mouth tight and eyes zipping across the page.

“He didn’t,” Erik says, words scratching the inside of his throat. It pains him to speak, jaw and lips aching around each syllable.

“I’m sorry?”

Erik’s elbows sink into the mattress — Charles’s mattress — pushing him up until a fist of pain slams into his chest. He’s knocked back onto the bed, shoulders and head smacking against the pillow, a guttural groan exploding in the room.

Charles’s head snaps up. “What are you doing?” he says, standing. “Don’t move you idiot.” Charles presses his hands against Erik’s shoulders, heels brushing against fresh wounds as he pins Erik to the mattress.

Another memory swells in Erik’s mind, Schmidt’s foot knocking against his side as Erik’s fingers claw through the frozen dirt surrounding the camp. “Don’t be an idiot, Erik. If you want a grave for your mother, move the shovel. How difficult can it be?”

 _Don’t call me that_ , Erik snaps. He jerks his shoulders, slaps Charles’s hands away, a lightening rod of pain shooting up his spine. Erik bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself from crying out.

Charles retreats, a light flickering in his eyes. Erik knows he’s peered into his mind, caught a flash of his pale knuckles and ice building on his wrists, Erik clawing at the frozen earth as his mother’s body, weeks old, lay rotting at his side. The image settles in his nostrils, the smell of death rancid and lingering. How relieved he’d been when Schmidt ordered him to toss her body into the oven.

“Erik, I —”

 _Don’t,_ Erik thinks, before Charles can dish out his awkward, hollow apology. _I don’t need or want your pity._

Charles nods. He takes his seat, comic book discarded on his desk, next to a small stack with issues more worn than the last. They’re the only clue that a child resides in Charles’s cabin, instead of a well-read young adult. Textbooks, leather notebooks, fountain pens with gold tips, mugs of cold tea, neatly folded sweaters, perfectly shined Oxfords, and a signed portrait of a mustached, pale-eyed man, staring wistfully to the left.

“That’s Ernest Rutherford,” Charles says, quietly, almost waiting for Erik to berate him. Erik’s too exhausted to do so. “He was a physicist. Assisted in the discovery of the neutron, though Chadwick did all the heavy lifting. I’m not too interested in physics or chemistry, but my father —” Charles’s voice snags. Erik watches as his eyes glaze over, his fingers trembling atop the desk. It’s barely a snippet of emotion before Charles straightens his spine and clears his throat. “My father was a fan. Met him in a pub in Edinburgh and got him to sign this,” Charles motions towards the photo hanging above his desk. “He wrote a few books but they’re all…Well, they’re not very interesting.”

Erik doesn’t know what to say, so he keeps his mouth pinned shut. There’s something soothing about Charles’s voice, the British cadence dancing across syllables, lazy and all-encompassing, like syrup dripping over a sweet meal.

“My father owned the lot of them, Rutherford’s texts. I — When I was six he used to read a few excerpts when I couldn’t sleep. That was,” another clearing of the throat, “um, the type of man he was. The type of — father he was to me. My mother,” and Charles looks at Erik, as if he’s making sure he’s listening, as if he wants, above all else, for Erik to understand, “she doesn’t feel very comfortable around me. Because of what I can do, you see, what I can hear. She doesn’t — Well, perhaps she _does_ — know that there’s so much of it, her fear, that it’s impossible for me not to know what she’s thinking. At least where I’m concerned. Sometimes she tricks herself into believing that I’m normal. Mostly when she’s drunk. But other times,” Charles pauses. “Do you ever feel that if, if someone could tie a leash around your neck or…Or put you in a cage, that they would?”

Erik doesn’t respond but he can’t stop his mind from filtering through hundreds of images, all involving Schmidt and the impossible length of his time in the camps.

“Of course,” Charles says. “Of course, I…”

A broad ditch of silence forms between them, separating one side of the room from the other. Charles bends his head, eyes fixed on his fingers, tapping mindlessly against his desk.

“Germany surrendered,” he says, locking eyes with Erik. “Winston Churchill announced it on the radio.”

Erik should be elated. The Allies have won. The war has truly come to an end. But all he can think is, what happens now? How are communities rebuilt from nothing but ash? And what of Peggy, of Howard? Did they make it out or are they two more people Erik has touched and loved, who this war has snatched away?

“We didn’t —” Erik tries to speak but another flash of pain knots in his jaw. _There was no radio in third class_.

“No. There wouldn’t be.”

Another block of silence. This time, Erik fills it.

_I met him once._

“Who?”

_Churchill._

Erik would’ve missed it if he wasn’t watching Charles so closely, the hint of a smile, ghosting across his mouth. “No, you didn’t.”

 _I did._ Erik allows another memory to flood the surface of his mind. Howard, introducing him to Winston Churchill after Steve’s memorial service. He’d clasped Erik’s shoulder and called him a brave young man.

Charles sits a little straighter in his seat, turns to face Erik completely. “You know Howard Stark?” he says, eyes bright as a string of lights.

Erik nods, as much as he can. _Very well._

“Wow. You — _Wow_. Did he ever tell you what he was working on? Oh! Has he perfected the flying car? I’d love a ride in one of those.”

 _A flying car?_ Erik’s never heard of it. _What good would one of those be?_

“Not everything has to be useful. Flying cars are cool.”

A small laugh, more like a rush of air, passes through Erik’s nostrils. Charles’s smile widens, feet hovering above the ground, kicking out excitedly.

“Don’t quote me on this, but I heard he was working on some sort ray gun. You know, harnessing energy to cut down on the manufacturing cost of bullets. Of course, that brings up another issue of employment but, I think —”

 _Charles_ .

“Hmm? Oh. Am I…I’m rambling aren’t I?”

_You are, and I’m not interested in your thoughts on ray guns when you’re still blocking my access to my power._

Charles blinks at him. The smile on his face drops, brows knitting softly in the middle. “Erik, I told you before, I’m not blocking anything.”

Erik can feel his rage bubbling up, an inch of it boiling in his stomach, but he’s too exhausted for anything more than a clench of fists. _You are._

“No, I promise you that I’m not. I don’t — I’m not even sure how something like that would work.”

_I don’t believe you._

Charles tosses him a look, tight-mouthed and narrow-eyed. “If I could block your power, don’t you think I would’ve stopped you from trying to choke me?”

_You’ve stopped me before._

“Yes, but not purposefully. I didn’t — I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t control it. I’ve apologized for that.”

_How do you know you’re not blocking me? How do you know you can’t control this either?_

Charles’s sigh is almost heavy enough for Erik to feel it weighing on his own chest. Charles presses two fingers to either temple and turns in his chair, visible only by his profile.

“It’s not — I don’t know how to explain it, but if I put something in your head, I would be able to feel it. I can’t meddle with people’s minds and sever my connection to them. Over time the feeling weakens. I can barely feel the thought I planted in my mother’s head about you, but it’s still there. Like a rope.”

Charles looks at him, gaze dripping with sincerity. He’s almost pleading for Erik to believe him, even if he knows it’s unlikely.

Erik can’t. If Charles hasn’t planted something in his brain then why can he no longer access the full breadth of his power? Why is his power almost as faint as the year it manifested?

“You know,” Charles says, “I once overheard my father talking about something called psychological repression. It’s when you, or, someone, prevents something from entering into their mind. A memory, an emotion. Do you,” and he turns in his chair, facing Erik again. “Maybe in an effort to block something out, you’ve also blocked yourself from accessing your power.”

_But I’m not blocking anything._

“Well, you wouldn’t really know, would you? That’s sort of the point. Maybe you’re carrying some guilt —”

Erik snaps. _I have nothing to feel guilty about._

Charles pauses and hums before, “Can you not access it at all?”

Erik lifts one finger from Charles’s mattress, his power spinning out and grabbing hold of the fountain pen on Charles’s desk. He steers the gold tip, the pen spinning like the dial of a compass.

“Extraordinary,” Charles says, almost breathless. “Really, Erik. It’s — What you can do is absolutely amazing. But I thought you said you were blocked?”

 _I am. I can do simple things but I can’t —_ He can’t grip the buckle of someone’s belt and twist it around their wrists, wrenching their arms behind their back until something snaps.

“Ah. Well. This is very interesting.”

Charles lifts one of his textbooks from the pile, flipping through the pages with a curious sort of hunger. He stops on a few pages and marks them with his fingers. With his freehand he grabs a notebook and scribbles a few notes, messily.

“I know you don’t want to hear this —”

_Then don’t say it._

“— but I think you’re blocking yourself. It’s a subconscious act, of course, and there’s no way for you to receive professional help, unless you wish to be institutionalized. But…Maybe…”

_What?_

Charles sets down his pen. “I know you don’t trust me, but I think I may be able to help. Not at this moment, but perhaps…Perhaps you and I could figure this out together? I unblock you and you —”

_Give you permission to live inside my mind?_

Charles’s mouth quirks up. “Not live, but take a brief holiday, yes.”

No. The word sticks to the roof of his mouth. Erik tries to lick it off, to send it floating on a brain wave, but it stubbornly remains locked behind his teeth.

“If I could show you that my intentions are honest, Erik, I would. I’d like to help you. If you would let me.”

The last time someone said something similar, he was locked in a hot box of a room, wearing down his nails as he scratched at a metal slab of a door. No. That’s not true. Steve and the Howling Commandos helped him. Howard helped him. Peggy helped him. Magda helped him. John helped him. William helped him (and what would he look like if William hadn’t?).

_Why?_

“Because I’ve seen glimpses of who you are, and you’re not as terrible as you think. You deserve your power, and, well, don’t you think people like us should stick together?”

People like us. Erik hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s true. Charles is the only other person he’s met that’s like him. Another mutated human. What are the chances?

“Mutated human?”

 _It’s what_ — Schmidt called him in his file, but Erik quite likes the ring of it. Maybe he can reclaim it.

“I like it too,” Charles says. “Mutated human. I should write that down.”

Erik listens to Charles’s pen scratch against his notebook, two words ringing in Erik’s ears. Mutated human. Mutated _humans_.

 _Alright_ , Erik thinks. He directs the word to Charles, coating it with the feeling of a shoulder bumping into another, a friendly jostle.

Charles looks at him over his shoulder, dark hair falling into his eyes, a smile twisted on his mouth. “Alright?”

Erik tries to control it, the grin causing his lips to quiver, stretching his mouth until he’s showing teeth. Charles’s cheeks swell and he’s laughing, joyous and bright. Erik laughs a little too, the sound weaving through his aching ribs.

 _Alright_ , he thinks again, loosening his grip on Charles’s sheets. Alright.


	5. Chapter 5

“My father,” Charles says, dragging his desk chair to Erik’s bed side, “was the first person who realized what I could do.”

A clumsy image forms in Erik’s mind, Brian Xavier looming over a bassinet, a stuffed pig in one hand, rattle in the other. Small hands grow from the edges, reaching for the pig but Brian keeps it out of reach.

“My earliest memories are filled with trials he conducted to test the limits of my telepathy. I learned to project what I was thinking before I could speak. My father believed if I could plant images into other people’s minds, then perhaps I could influence their train of thought.”

Another image, an intimate dinner party of four. Charles, Sharon, Brian, and another man with a sweep of black hair. Kurt Marko, his father’s colleague who laughs with his mouth full and leers at Charles’s mother over his glass of wine. Sharon doesn’t notice. She’s on her fourth glass, and though Charles is only eight, he cannot help but count.

Mr. Marko has a son who is unremarkable in every way. He isn’t intelligent or handsome or engaging. “Not like your boy,” Kurt says, beaming at Charles. “What’s his IQ again?”

Brian answers but Charles doesn’t hear him, too wrapped up in the way his mother rolls her eyes and finishes her drink. Her fingers wrap around the neck of the wine bottle, ready to pour another. A stray drop of red escapes. Not enough to fill a thimble.

She pushes back from the table. “I’m heading to the kitchen. Would you boys like another drink?”

Charles’s world narrows until he sees nothing but Sharon, her blonde hair glowing beneath the chandelier’s warm light. Her mind is blurred at the edges, thoughts circling around a single point; Charles, her only son, a freak who can read minds.

Sharon’s disdain curls the corner of her mouth and forms a palm and five fingers, slapping at Charles’s cheek. A pained emotion bleeds from Charles’s mind and into hers, dragging her sharp gaze towards her son. Her disgust is almost tangible, a knot that lives in her stomach and throat, twisting and turning until she can taste nothing but vomit.

His mother turns towards the kitchen and a hot streak of determination fills Charles up. A single word blooms in his mind.

 _Stop_.

His mother freezes at the kitchen’s threshold, one foot hovering in front of the other.

If he thinks hard enough Charles can sense the web of her thoughts: the tangle of emotions she feels for her husband, the grief of her parent’s passing, a flicker of regret for Charles’s birth. His head aches but he pushes through the pain, prodding at the negative thoughts surrounding his existence. He wraps a hand around it, but the thought is connected to hundreds of others. If he rips it out his mother might be proud of what he can do but she won’t remember large swashes of her childhood, or the night she met her husband, or the first time Charles smiled, or —

Erik blinks. Across from him Charles presses two fingers against his temples, warding off a headache. “I’m sorry. I told you, I can’t always control it.”

Erik’s words are weighed down with the haze of drugs, administrated every six hours before a meal. “It’s alright.”

Charles blinks. “Thank you,” he says. Then, “I was thinking we could do something similar, push your power until we pinpoint the limitation of your mental block.”

“How?”

Charles grabs a notebook and props it on his knee. “Why don’t you explain your mutation in detail.”

Erik’s tongue hangs motionless in his mouth. He understands his power on an instinctual level, like he understands how to blink and breathe, but he doesn’t have words for the power in his fingertips, or the taste of iron on his tongue. He doesn’t know how to explain turning six and having the world come alive, every inch of metal calling out to him, warming his blood.

A pinch of curiosity burns at the base of Erik’s brain. Charles reaches two fingers towards Erik’s forehead and says, “Maybe I could look?”

Erik nods.

Charles’s fingers brush against Erik’s temple and his memories crack open like an egg; the light in his mother’s eyes as Erik twisted forks, spoons, and knives into intricate, abstract shapes; his father’s laughter as Erik popped the gold buttons from his favorite jacket; the satisfaction of tipping over a classmate’s chair, limbs spilling wildly on the floor; the hum of the train tracks shifting beneath their carriage, Erik’s forehead against his mother’s back; the twitch of his fingers as he tests the barbed wire surrounding the camp; the acid in his throat as his mother’s blood drips across Schmidt’s floor.

There are hundreds more. Erik’s power tugging on his mother’s bracelet; Erik, pushing his father’s glasses up the bridge of his nose; Erik, feeling, tasting, smelling the weight of Schmidt’s coin in his pocket, as Schmidt lifts Erik’s head and smashes it against the ground.

A burst of white light burns in Erik’s mind. Charles is sitting across from him, scribbling furiously in his notebook.

“Alright,” he says, setting down his pen. “Let’s try something else.”

Charles buries himself in Erik’s mind, weaving between the cracks of his memories until Erik’s exhaustion casts him out. Charles wakes him for lunch — tomato soup, creamed corn, and a syrette of morphine pumped into his arm.

Erik wakes again to the sound of Sharon’s heels clicking towards Charles’s room. She hovers at the door, her eyes skating across Erik’s. This strange boy, laying in her son’s bed. The sight draws up her spine and straightens her mouth. “Get dressed,” she says to Charles. “Dinner is in twenty.”

Hunched at his desk, nose inches away from his notebook, he says without looking up, “I’m eating with Erik. We’ll get something from the kitchen.”

Charles remains glued to Erik’s side for twenty-four hours. He naps in his chair, dozing off for ten minutes at a time before his eyes flutter open and he’s back on his feet, pacing to keep awake and keep watch.

Erik cannot help but remember the night before he and his parents were caught. A friend of his father’s granted them in solace in their barn, hiding them between three tall stacks of hay. His parents slept fitfully but Erik lay awake, soaking in the stench of manure and the coolness of the earth, scratching against his back like dull nails protruding from rotting wood. He stretched his power and caressed his mother’s necklace, his father’s watch. He focused on their breathing and the slight shifts of their bodies. He wondered how they could sleep now that they were on the run, fear drowning them at every turn.

 _You are very brave,_ Charles thinks from his chair, his chin resting on pulled up knees.

“I’m not brave,” Erik says.

“You are. Now stop arguing with me and go back to sleep.”

 

| |

 

There’s a knock at the front door. Erik almost misses it, a silver spoon stuffed in his fist, his power swollen in his ears. Charles wants him to bend it, a trick he’s known since his power’s manifestation, but the spoon only trembles.

Charles cranes his head towards the noise, brows furrowed in the middle. He uncurls his limbs from his chair and straightens his shoulders, a rod settling into his back.

“Did your mother forget her key?”

Charles doesn’t respond. He disappears into the hall, bare feet slapping against the wooden floor. Erik can almost taste his discomfort as the front door opens and another voice floods the cabin. Male and muffled. Charles’s discomfort spikes into something violent. He hisses, “He’s sleeping,” and Erik catches a glimpse of small, clenched fists.

The voice grows arms, legs, and feet, limbs used to bypass Charles as the stranger shoves his way into the cabin. Charles chases after him, his power throbbing dangerously at his temples. It bleeds out and cottons beneath the bridge of Erik’s nose. Erik wonders if this man, this stranger, will blink and find himself locked in the hull of the ship, nursing a black hole where his memories are meant to be.

Erik sets the spoon in his lap and folds his hands atop it. With the ache in his stomach and the injury to his head, there is not much else to do but wait and listen as heavy boots maneuver down the hall, Charles’s feet pattering after them. Perhaps the onboard police have caught wind of the fight and are looking to lock Erik up until they reach port. Perhaps Charles’s control has slipped and Sharon no longer believes that Erik is in her care; he’s nothing more than a third class menace whose wormed his way into her son’s bed.

A flicker of panic rises in his throat, the taste of it greater than the faint waves of power in his fingertips. He can sense the silver of the spoon like he can sense the iron bed frame but he cannot bend them to his will, no more than he can lift the coin from the stranger’s pocket and wrap it around the man’s throat.

His head snaps up.

Not the coin, _his_ coin, resting in the pocket of the boy who stole it.

Charles has seen Fergus’s red cheeks and sweat covered mouth in Erik’s mind. He knows of the strength in Fergus’s fists, how easily he took Erik down with a one-two punch to the face. No wonder Charles is alarmed. Fergus is an animal, deserving nothing more than a collar around the neck and a boot against the back of his skull.

Erik’s panic rises like a tide, wisps of his power knotting into his palm. Has Fergus come to finish him off? Is he stupid enough to strangle Erik in someone else’s bed?

Erik could warm the coin up and burn a hole in the jacket Howard bought him (No doubt Fergus is wearing it, a wolf masquerading as a sheep, failing to blend in with the old money spread out amongst first class.) but Erik’s power won’t allow him. He can do nothing but grit his teeth as he pushes himself into a seated position. The pain knots in his shoulders and stomach, nearly knocking the wind out of him, but he won’t allow Fergus to see him on his back.

But it’s not Fergus who saunters into Charles’s bedroom.

It’s William, a small smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. There’s a new bruise on his cheek, purple and spreading towards his ear. A sloppy punch, almost missed by the turn of his head. Although he’s attempted to clean himself up, William looks out of place in Charles’s cream colored cabin. His button-down shirt is too tight, his waist coast is the wrong color, and, after he spins Charles’s desk chair around, kicking one leg over, sitting on it backwards, his legs are too long, spilling almost comically over the sides. “How are you?” he says.

From his spot propped on his desk, Charles interjects. “He needs his rest.”

William barely spares Charles a glance before he leans closer towards the bed. “How are you?”

Erik’s jaw aches, when he breathes his stomach cramps, and no matter how many cups of tea Charles pours down his throat, he can still taste the blood in his mouth. “Fantastic.”

William laughs.

The sound causes Charles to visibly stiffen, his arms crossed and chin pushed high. Erik thinks he’s never looked more like his mother.

“I thought he was going to kill you,” William says.

“Almost,” Erik says, “but not quite.”

Charles interrupts again, says, “I can’t believe you didn’t stop him.” Erik doesn’t know if Charles is talking about William stopping him or Fergus, either way, the thought is almost laughable. Erik would’ve tied William to the bedposts if he tried.

William finally looks at Charles. In his fitted shirt, sleeves rolled up to slim elbows, legs dangling over his desk, Charles seems impossibly young, dwarfed in William’s hulking shadow, but Charles is unafraid. “If you thought this — _Fergus_ was going to kill him, why didn’t you do something?”

William glances at Erik as if to say, Where did you manage to dig him up? “You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Oh?”

William eyes sweep across Charles’s bedroom, larger than William and Erik’s shared quarters and filled with notebooks and ink wells and blazers and gold watches. Charles doesn’t know what it’s like to live without choice, to be thrown into a ring of fire and have to claw your way out.

 _That’s not true,_ Charles thinks at Erik as William says, “No.”

Charles fixes his jaw a little tighter, his back straightening up. “You’re right, I wouldn’t understand being a reckless idiot.”

William brushes Charles off. He says to Erik, “I brought you something.”

Erik doesn’t have to look at Charles to know he’s red in the face. He’s known him for less than a month and yet Erik knows Charles isn’t someone who likes to be ignored, especially when a portion of the conversation rests with him. That flush bleeds down Charles’s cheeks and into his shirt collar until it reaches his wrist, his knuckles, and the curved tips of his fingers, clawing into the edge of his desk.

Erik already knows what William has brought him but he keeps his face neutral, as William turns to Charles and says, “Give us a minute?”

Charles’s knuckles are white. A stucco of irritability knocks against the inside of Erik’s mind. “This is my room.” Charles looks to Erik for assistance, for someone to be on his side, but William has Erik’s coin and Erik wants, no needs, to see and hold it again.

 _It will only be a minute_ , he thinks.

“Fine.” Charles pushes himself from his desk. “I’ll go make some tea.”

William waits until Charles is out of earshot to snort and say, “Where did you find him?”

Erik thinks, he found me. “Our fathers knew each other before the war.”

Something shifts in William’s posture, an unease in his arms and wrists. “You didn’t tell me you were rich.”

“I’m not telling you now. What did you bring me?”

William pulls the coin from his pocket and pinches it between two fingers. He raises it slightly, the nickel glittering in the light. William’s eyes graze over the _Reichsadler_ , it’s wings spanned to either side; an image of comfort to the Nazi regime. An image Erik has forced himself not to fear. “I couldn’t get your jacket, but I thought you might want this.”

William tosses it in the air and Erik catches it. A faint shimmer of power wraps around it, building a new nest for it to live.

“Thank you.”

William nods and says nothing.

Would be rude to ask him to leave. Erik enjoys his company, but he can’t hover the coin in the midair, his power bending and separating, forming a constantly shifting wave, while William is here. After all, what would William do if he knew of the power living inside of Erik? Would his eyes widen in wonder like Charles? Or would his defenses fly up, eyes narrow and ready to attack? (“You are lucky,” he remembers Schmidt telling him once, “that you’re with me. Anyone else would’ve had you hanged.”)

Before Erik can decide, William breaks the silence and asks, “What do you remember from before the war?”

Erik cannot remember much. The memories he has are frayed at the edges and altered by time. He isn’t sure what’s accurate and what’s a dream, but he remember the absence of fear; the comfort of knowing no matter how many rocks were thrown at his father’s storefront window, no matter how many whispered slurs he was forced to endure, that everything would be alright.

He can feel a round of hysterical laughter threatening to spill out, but Erik swallows until it burns in his stomach. How naive he must’ve been, to think it all wouldn’t build to something like this. But he cannot share these thoughts William, the boy who doesn’t know he’s a Jew, so Erik shrugs. “What do you remember?”

For a moment William’s gaze drifts, his eyes glazing over before the corner of his mouth quirks up, faint and sad. “I remember how warm the winters used to be.”

His words bubble up before Erik can trap them. “Me too.”

William looks at him, truly looks at him, and Erik wonders, what are the odds that William is him, like Charles? Can he peer into Erik’s thoughts, pushing through the barbed wire and unlocked gates, to the tangle of memories that have shaped him into the weak, powerless boy who’s beat bloody and confined to someone else’s bed? Can he see Erik’s bare feet, slapping against the frozen ground of the camp as he runs lap after lap, blisters bursting underfoot. Can he taste the gobs of snow melting in Erik’s mouth as he shoves handfuls down his throat? Can he feel the unforgiving winter chill, scratching against his naked head and shoulders, covering the piles of bodies thrown in the center of the camp. Another warning, revolution thwarted.

A warmth spread across Erik’s hands, his coin growing hot enough to melt when William finally breaks his gaze.

Erik is about to speak but a crash in the kitchen — porcelain shattering about the tiled floor — interrupts the words forming in his mouth. Erik and William toss shared looks towards the open door and Charles appears, pink cheeked and wild eyed, the handle of a broken teacup hanging from his fingers.

 _Are you alright?_ Erik thinks, but Charles won’t look at him. He only has eyes for William.

An unrecognizable wave of feelings — fear, disgust, anger — knots in his stomach. Not his emotions, but Charles’s. They form a rope that spreads towards his spine and wrenches Erik forward, head between his knees as he heaves.

William touches Erik’s shoulder and presses his hand against forehead, beads of sweat pouring from his hairline. “Hold on.” He grabs the waste bucket. “Here.”

Erik grabs the edges of the bin and vomits.

He feels the second Charles reels himself in, leaving Erik with a hollow echo in his stomach and throat. _What was that?_ Erik thinks, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Charles ignores him and says to William, “I think it’s time for you to leave.” There’s ice carved around the edges of his words, thick enough to leave no room for argument, but William finds a crack.

“I’m going to wait until his fever goes down.”

“No,” Charles shouts, the word rattling in Erik’s brain. “You’re going to leave now.”

William stands. He looms over Charles, an impenetrable brick wall that forces Charles’s head back, his gaze reaching for the ceiling but once more, Charles is unafraid. Erik cannot blame him. William may be able to physically over power Charles, but with his power Charles could rip William’s mind to shreds.

“Leave,” Charles says.

Something in William’s eyes flicker. The fire, the determination fizzles. He backs away from Charles and says, “Okay.” He gives Erik another look. “I’ll see you later?”

Erik looks at Charles. _What did you do to him?_ but Charles won’t even give him the courtesy of a glance. “Yes,” Erik says.

Charles walks William to the front door. It opens and closes, locking William out. Erik braces himself for another wave of emotion, for Charles to storm into his bedroom, a finger outstretched, demanding to know why Erik wouldn’t take his side over William’s, but minutes pass before Charles makes his way back. He’s glassy eyed and wrung out, brown hair a mess atop his head. He still won’t look at Erik. Not as he closes his bedroom door and plops down the floor, a nearly blank face towards the ceiling.

Erik cannot erase the last few moments from his mind, how easy William gave in. He’s readying himself to ask again — What did you do to him? — but Charles speaks before the words form in his mouth.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Something sour grows in the back of Erik’s throat. “You don’t have a choice. What did you do to him, Charles?”

Charles’s head whips in his direction, mouth tight and eyes ablaze with all that lives inside of him, a nearly untamable power that rolls borderless like a forest fire. “We will talk about this later.” Erik wants to fight back, to force Charles to talk to him, but when he opens his mouth again, Charles says, “Don’t speak, please, just — Go to sleep.”

 

| |

 

The morning comes slow. Erik keeps a pulse on the metal arms of the nightstand’s clock, feeling time crawl by.

He sleeps because he must, and when he wakes, Charles has disappeared from his spot on the floor. He isn’t curled in his chair or sitting with his head against the foot of his bed. He’s left Erik alone in the suffocating darkness of his cabin.

The aftertaste of last night’s frustration rots in his mouth, heady like the smell of cold tea Charles has left behind. Two untouched teacups rest on his desk. It would be cruel, Erik thinks, if they’re both meant for him. Charles’s desk is on the other side of the room. Erik will have to climb out of bed if he wants a drink. And he does, if only to wash the bitterness and clammy taste of morning away.

Charles has taken to wearing a gold watch, another exercise meant to test the limits of Erik’s power. He can track Charles wherever he goes, tugging on it, if Erik needs his attention. But when Erik stretches his fingers, searching the cabin for any hint of the familiar watch, he finds it thrown on the bedroom floor.

Erik bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself from cursing, a surge of anger clawing at his throat. Where the hell is he?

It’s five thirty. Charles is never awake at this hour but Erik always is, another nightmare rousing him from sleep. Charles is running from him, hiding, shielding himself away because he doesn’t want to have another conversation he’ll lose. Erik makes sure to amplify his thoughts, allowing them to grow like clouds, large enough for Charles to hear. He receives nothing. Not even a mental turn of the head.

Erik sets his jaw. Fine, he thinks, gripping the sheets beneath him. Erik can beat Charles at this game too.

He’s been bedridden for a little over forty-eight hours and while he’s still unable to move without a lightening rod of pain shooting across his shoulders, down his back, and around his torso, he’s been mobile through worse.

It takes ten minutes for him to climb out of bed and move to the door, a hand bracing the furniture for balance. Erik hates himself for getting soft, for allowing his backbone, his resilience, to disappear. In the camp Erik could run on a broken foot, he could carry a shovelful of coal with a sprained wrist, and while the pain bordered on unbearable, he pushed through it.

Erik clamps down on his tongue, refusing to cry out as he maneuvers down the hall and towards the living area. Sharon’s bedroom is upstairs, the spiral staircase leading to the closed bedroom door. Good. Erik doesn’t know how to face her without Charles beside him; he certainly doesn’t know how to face her in his current state.

How does he look? Bruised and wobbling in day-old pajamas, stinking of sweat and vomit. More or less pathetic then when he was on his back, Fergus standing over him, arms raised in the air as he relished in his victory?

Charles isn’t in the small kitchen, the bathroom, or the study. He isn’t waiting outside of his mother’s room or in Erik’s room. He could be roaming about the boat, but Erik checks one last place and it’s there he finds him, on the floor of the balcony, a blanket wrapped around him as he stares past the railing.

The mornings are always cold and wet, the ocean kicking up sprinkles of saltwater that douse Charles’s bare feet.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says when Erik steps outside. He looks up at him. “You should be in bed.” There’s an emptiness in Charles’s voice, as if someone scooped out his optimism, and tossed it overboard. It’s unsettling, like staring at a shell of the boy who was full of life mere hours ago.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” Erik says, though it isn’t the whole truth. “I thought — I want to talk about what happened last night.”

Charles sighs and pulls the blanket tighter around him. “Of course,” he says. “I knew that. Have a seat, please.”

Erik doesn’t allow himself to hesitate. He bites the inside of his cheek and forces himself to the floor, ignoring the way his muscles knot uncomfortably, painfully, screaming out for him to stop.

There isn’t much room on the balcony. Erik must sit with his back against the door, legs pushed out in front of him as his shoulder brushes against Charles. He’s almost tall enough for his socked feet to reach the railing, but not quite.

“In a couple of years, surely,” Charles says. “You’ll be giant.”

“Like my father.”

Charles tenses up and Erik bites the inside of his cheek. He’s forgotten that Charles has just lost his father. But Charles says, “It’s not that, it’s…” He trails off, eyes focusing on the water in front of them. It’ll be overcast today, the sun rising behind a trail of clouds, ribbons of yellow light peering through. “I want to be honest with you, Erik, but you have to — You have to promise you won’t overreact.”

“I can’t promise anything.”

Charles’s mouth quirks up, a ghost of a smile. “No, I suppose you can’t.” Charles moves to look at him but tears his gaze away at the last moment. “Your mental block could be potentially dangerous. We don’t know what triggered it and we won’t know what’s waiting on the other side. If something stronger is building beneath this suppression, I don’t — We can’t — I can’t have you ripping a hole in the ship because you’re angry.”

“I won’t do that.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t promise anything?”

“Charles,” Erik turns toward him. “What are you going on about?”

A stretch of silence encompasses them. For a moment, Erik’s afraid Charles won’t say anything at all, but then, “I looked into William’s mind. I didn't — I don’t trust him, and I…”

Impatience, and that familiar burst of panic, grows in the pit of Erik’s stomach. “You what?”

Charles looks at him. “What do you know about him?”

Erik shrugs. “Not much.”

Charles looks away. “I — It might be easier if I show you what I saw.”

Erik swallows and doesn’t miss the lump that’s built in his throat. He tries to ignore it but it grows with every passing second. Hard, tasteless, choking him. “Alright, show me what you saw.”

Charles’s hand is trembling as he removes it from his beneath his blanket. Erik feels a finger against his temple and the next thing he feels is something white and hot searing through his brain. There are images, millions of them, all with sharp edges, bumping against one another in a poor attempt to create a cohesive narrative. There is laughter and shouting in German, English, and French. There is music and dancing and clapping and dishes breaking. There are knives and guns and lips on bare skin, and nails and smiles and red hair and small feet.

“Oh god, Erik,” he hears from above. It’s Charles, frantic, panicked, hovering over him as Erik lays with his back to the balcony. “I’m sorry.” He’s discarded his blanket. He’s still in his clothes from last night. “I didn’t — I was trying to show you but it didn’t — _god_ , it didn’t work.”

It feels as though Charles has taken a hammer to his brain, beating him until his eyes crossed. But he tells him, “It’s alright,” because he wants to know, _needs_ to know. “Just tell me what you saw.”

Charles presses his lips together and looks away from him, his head craning back towards the sea.

Erik grabs his shoulder, his arm, his wrist, his hand. “Charles. Please.”

There is something breaking inside of him as Charles says, slowly, “He was…Did William ever tell you he was in the war?”

Erik’s mouth runs dry. It’s a stupid question, but one he must ask. “Is he a Jew, like me?”

Charles shakes his head. “No.” He pauses. Seconds tick by before, “He was a solider.”

Erik’s hand tightens around Charles’s, his thumb pressing against his palm. “A British solider?”

Their eyes meet. “No, Erik. He was a German solider.”

The lump in his throat drops into his stomach, a bomb made of acid and set alight. He feels like vomiting, like screaming, but he cannot, he will not —

“What did you see, Charles?” he says, Erik’s hand tightening around his. It must hurt but he can’t let go and Charles is not pulling away.

Charles’s mouth opens and for a moment, no sound escapes. Then, “I saw him in a forest, with a gun. I saw people…Families, being rounded up and…” Charles shakes his head, tears pricking the corners of his eyes. “Nobody was screaming, nobody was running. Why wouldn’t they run, Erik? They could’ve tried to get away.”

A sob sticks in Charles’s throat, growing until his cheeks are wet. Erik wants to slap and shake him, to let Charles know what would’ve happened if they ran; how a bullet to the head is better than being beat and kicked and worked to death. But Erik cannot move. He can only allow his emotions to boil inside of him.

His fingers are wound so tightly around Charles’s, he fears he might break it. But when Erik tries to pull away, Charles reaches for him again.

“He’s running away,” Charles says. “And Mr. Pryce is —”

Charles collapses into another fit of tears. He bends forward, forehead resting against Erik’s chest, heavy against the smattering bruise painting him pink and purple and black. There's pain, somewhere deep and clawing at his bones, but Erik can feel nothing but the sheets of steel around them; whirring, buzzing, hissing, moving. A mobile weapon beneath his back and under his feet.

Erik flexes his fingers around Charles's, a thumb grazing across his trembling knuckles. "I am not going to let him run away," he says. "I am going to kill him."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the excruciatingly long update time. New job, new hours, etc. I hope you guys enjoy :)


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